The first "Mormon Cowboy" has been inducted into the Cowboy Memorial Museum in Caliente, Calif., a Kern County ranching town in the Tehachapi Mountains.
Museum director Paul de Fonville recently paid tribute to the late Earl Bascom as "one of the great pioneers of rodeo — a cowboy through and through."
Bascom died in 1995, at the age of 89, at his Victorville, Calif., ranch. He was a cowboy and rodeo participant for many years and worked on the Scorup Ranch in Utah (1 million acres) and the Knight Ranches in Alberta, Canada, that ran some 18,000 head of cattle.
He also invented rodeo's first one-hand bareback rigging in 1924, now standard equipment for bareback bronc riding that is used worldwide even today in rodeos. He also was a patriarch in the Victorville LDS Stake for many years.
Bascom's name will now be placed alongside other rodeo greats such as Casey Tibbs and Yakima Canutt, at the museum. The Cowboy Memorial Museum is home to the largest collection of branding irons in the world and hosts an annual "Cowboy Chuckwagon Dinner."