How do you? you use? How do you? Howdy and welcome to Wise About Texas, the Texas History Podcast.

This is your host, Ken Wise, and it's fall in Texas.

We've had a couple of cold fronts come through and

everybody's very happy about that. More important it's football season in Texas.

And that's second only to religion and it's a very close second.

But October in Texas used to mean something else.

It meant the Texas Prison Rodeo.

So today on Wise About Texas, we're going to prison, but it's not for the reason you think.

We're going to go to the Texas Prison Rodeo, so we're going to go back five decades from the 30s to the 80s and we're going to get wise about Texas.

Well for over 50 years the Texas prison system held a rodeo at the Huntsville Unit in Huntsville, Texas.

Now the Huntsville Unit has a nickname, it's called The Walls, and if you've ever seen

the unit, it's right in downtown Huntsville and it's got these

enormous red brick walls so we call it the walls and we're gonna do something a

little unusual for this And one for the podcast episode outlines that I used.

In fact, the one for the first episode

on the first judges of Texas,

I actually turned into a published journal article

in the Supreme Court Historical Society Journal.

So that's the level of scholarship I'm aiming for.

And when you're doing that sort of work in history,

you go to the archives and you go to the libraries

and you're looking for original sources, primary sources.

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