SISTERS – Heckle, Roan Ranger, Tootsie Roll, Gypsy Gold and Chief Joseph: These are horses that can make or break a cowboy’s career.

While cowboys usually get all the credit, they would be nowhere without their broncos. Many rodeo-goers don’t realize that both riders and mounts are judged for their performance. Those numbers are combined for the rider’s final score.

And like the cowboys, these horses are working the rodeo circuit themselves. Only the best on the circuit will make it to the corrals at the National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas.

As riders pulled off the highway for Friday’s main event, Casey Beard and family were sorting Sisters Rodeo’s bucking horses. Sending up swirls of dust and dirt, cowboys on horseback peeled single stallions and mares from the herd and drove them into corrals with chutes leading into the arena.

”The very best cowboy might get the worst horse, or vice versa,” said Beard of Heppner, a breeder and stock contractor whose family business supplied the horses for Sisters’ bareback and saddle bronc competition.

”It’s all up to chance,” he said. In the golden days of rodeo, horse and rider’s names were drawn from hats – thus the origin of the phrase ”luck of the draw,” Beard said.

These days, horses and riders are randomly matched by a computer at the Professional Rodeo Cowboy Association’s headquarters in Colorado Springs.

Bucking horses are only good for one thing: rodeos.

”It’s getting a lot more difficult to find good (bucking) horses,” Beard said. ”Through selective breeding, people don’t want those traits that make a good bucking horse.

”People tend to think horses are all gentle and kind,” Beard said.

That’s not the case for the top buckers, which in proper cowpoke parlance, are sometimes mean as a tick.

The best bucking horses can be worth $25,000. A standard one will run about $5,000.

One of Beard’s personal favorites is Heckle, a massive bay that has made 12 appearances at the National Finals. ”To us, he’s invaluable,” he said.

What is it that makes a bronc buck? Beard said good buckers are naturals, but the flank makes them even better. The flank is a wool-covered strap that hugs the horse’s underside just in front of the hind legs.

”It’s an issue of some concern to animal rights activists,” Beard said.

Beard Rodeo Co. brought some 90 horses and about 40 bulls for the rodeo. His company, one of fewer than 60 similar outfits in North America, travels throughout the Northwest to more than a dozen rodeos a year.

”This has to be something you do for love because nobody would do it for the money,” Beard said. He has been going to rodeos his whole life.

Cowboys may never grow old, but bucking horses eventually do. Beard retires a few each year.

”The back pasture’s getting increasingly filled with the ones that have earned their keep,” he said.

Todd Dayton can be reached at 541-383-0354 or tdayton@bendbulletin.com.