In the North American imagination, the rodeo cowboy is one of the most evocative images of the Wild West. A frontier master, he is renowned for his masculinity, toughness, and skill. A Wilder West returns to rodeo's small-town roots to explore how, beneath its showman's surface, rodeo represents a way of life that simultaneously embodies and subverts our traditional understandings of power relations between man and nature, women and men, settlers and Aboriginal peoples. Historian Mary-Ellen Kelm demonstrates that rodeo has been an important contact zone – a chaotic and unpredictable place of encounter – that challenged expected social hierarchies. Rodeo has brought people together across racial divides, creating friendships, rivalries, and unexpected intimacies. It was a place where competency was celebrated as much in the victories of cowgirls as cowboys. At the rodeo, if nowhere else, Aboriginal riders became local heroes, and rodeo queens spoke their minds. A Wilder West complicates the idea of western Canada as a “white man's country” and shows how rural rodeos have carved out communities where different rules applied. Lavishly illustrated, this creative history will change the way we think about the West's most controversial sport.