The First Stampede of Flores LaDue: The True Love Story of Florence and Guy Weadick and the Beginning of the Calgary Stampede

Alberta at the end of the nineteenth century was wild, cruel, impossibly beautiful, romantic, and exactly the place for two rebels like trick roper Flores LaDue and rodeo promoter Guy Weadick to fall hopelessly in love. Flores LaDue grew up in Minnesota, listening to adventure tales about cowboys, traders, prospectors, and Wild West vaudeville. In secret, she learned to ride and rope from Sioux friends on the local reservation. At sixteen, she threw off the shackles of societal expectations for women and ran away to join the circus. Guy Weadick, too, was enthralled from a young age by the Wild West shows and stories of cowboys on the great cattle ranges of the West, and he ran away from his home in Rochester, New York, at fourteen to become a cowboy.

     Guy first saw Flores hanging upside down from her horse as she swung a lariat, and his fate was sealed. He knew that she was the only one for him. It took Guy a year to track down the dark-haired cowgirl and arrange to join her touring Wild West show. Their first meeting was electric and changed the course of history. The combination of Flores LaDue’s formidable will and Guy Weadick’s vision culminated in 1912 with the most spectacular of accomplishments—the Calgary Stampede.