A collection of action photos.

In August of 2007, I packed up headed out to Phillipsburg, Kan., home of Kansas’ Biggest Rodeo. The resulting story, audio slideshow and photo gallery show were produced for www.ljworld.com.

The story

PHILLIPSBURG, KANSAS

The baritone voice of John Wayne reverberated throughout the arena reciting “America, Why I Love Her” to the thousands of denim-clad cowboys and cowgirls.

A discord of smells, including manure, hamburgers and sweat, wafted overhead as the announcer’s microphone screeched sharply into focus.

“Are you guys ready for some rodeo?” chirped the announcer, bouncing wall-to-wall sound in an overhead booth.

Since 1929, rodeo fans nationwide have transformed Phillipsburg, a small northwestern Kansas town, into a bustling, unpredictable city. Home of Kansas’ Biggest Rodeo, Phillipsburg, about 60 miles north of Hays in Phillips County, is an anomaly in western Kansas, where the state’s population is declining and aging, and communities struggle to find a voice in contemporary America.

“It’s probably what’s keeping this town alive,” said Terry Gitchel, a Phillipsburg resident and past amateur bull rider.

“There would be a lot less money coming into this place, I know that.”

The population of Phillipsburg swelled to three times its normal size Saturday as an estimated 6,000 people flocked to the annual rodeo. The town’s two motels were booked six months in advance. Long waits at the local restaurants were expected.

The event attracts the biggest names in rodeo, including past and current world champions, homegrown Kansas talent hoping to make it big, and even Frenchman Evan Jayne, a bareback rider from Marseille, who shared this year’s bareback title with Chris Harris, of Itasca, Texas.

“This rodeo has turned into a community event,” said Rod Innes, president of the rodeo. “Class reunions are held on this weekend. Family reunions are held on this weekend. Everyone comes home for the rodeo.”

The rodeo, it seems, is intrinsically linked to life in Phillipsburg.

Peyton Baldwin, a Kansas University senior from Gardner, was busy selling custom ropes, hats, spurs, boots and belt buckles in her family-owned and operated mobile western store. Baldwin and her family travel the country each summer hitting the professional rodeo circuit and state fairs.

“For a little town like this, it’s a big deal,” said Baldwin as she counted change in the mobile storefront parked on the rodeo grounds.

Beneath the stands, rodeo cowboys taped their arms, tucked their Wranglers inside their boots and stretched, preparing for the first and most physically demanding event of the evening: the bareback ride.

Dressed in neon and doused in makeup, Greg Rumohr, a bull fighter from Rio Vista, Texas, entertained the crowd with daring encounters with 2,000-pound bulls in the arena.

“I’ve had my ears tore off,” Rumohr said. “The worst one I took was when a bull stuck a horn on the inside of the cheek of my butt. It didn’t go into my intestines so I was able to fight bulls the next night.”

SHARON SPRINGS James White grabbed three prairie rattlesnakes by the tail, uncoiled them with a light shake and bit down on their tails. He swung the snakes as they dangled from his mouth, then dropped them to the ground.

“Boy, they’re hot today,” the veteran snake handler from Texas said as he worked the snake pit.

It was 91 degrees, the hottest day of the year so far in Sharon Springs. The rattlers weren’t happy.

“Come on fellas, cooperate,” White said as he nudged them with his boot, trying to get them to strike. White and three handlers, known as the Fangs and Rattlers, were circling in a pit filled with 135 rattlesnakes gathered from various parts of western Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas for the 13th annual Rattlesnake Roundup in Sharon Springs.

The two-day festival, held May 7 and 8 in Wallace County on the Colorado border, is the only one of its kind in Kansas. It attracts snake hunters, reptile lovers and adventurers looking to spend a weekend with one of the West’s most storied predators.

White, 56, was married in a snake pit in Onaga, and has been handling rattlers for 48 years. He holds a world record for dangling 10 rattlers from his mouth at one time. He’s only been bitten once.

The announcer proclaimed White “the oldest and the best snake handler ever.”

In the early afternoon, groups of snake hunters slithered into the festival sunburned and dehydrated. They had spent the morning chasing rattlers around prairie dog towns, home of the snakes’ favorite meal. Scott Plankenhorn, from Sublette, and his snake hunting buddy Kenny Fields, from Garden City, unloaded their buckets filled with 45 prairie rattlers into the Fangs and Rattlers’ snake pit. They caught the bulk of their snakes near Garden City.

“We hunt rattlesnakes for relaxation,” said Plankenhorn, a foreman in a feed yard.

Plankenhorn and Fields sold their catch to Judie Withers, a local dealer and the roundup’s organizer, for $3.50 per pound. They pocketed about $150. Withers said she planned to sell the 135 rattlers she bought at the roundup to a buyer in Colorado Springs, Colo. The buyer cans the snake meat and makes wallets, boots, purses and other fashion accessories from snake skin.

A few choice rattlers, typically the larger western diamondback species, were taken to a small shed at the festival called the “processing center.” The snakes were butchered and the raw meat sold at a nearby booth. Deep fried rattler was for sale at the booth.

Withers estimated the show drew 2,000 people, more than doubling the town’s population that weekend.

“No vacancy” signs were lit up on all three motels along U.S. Highway 40 in Sharon Springs. Without the roundup, Sharon Springs might dry up and fade away, Withers said.

“We’re a poor county,” she said, “and we didn’t have anything going on here.”

Drought and increasing competition from corporate farming operations have dealt many western Kansas farmers and ranchers a huge economic blow. Withers said residents in Wallace County were seeking ways to reinvent themselves and explore new ways of generating revenue.

“We needed something to help the local economy,” she said.

When Withers was told by a friend about roundups in Texas and Oklahoma, she passed along the idea for a similar event in Sharon Springs to local officials. Led by then-state Sen. Sheila Frahm from Colby, legislation was soon passed in Topeka to allow the commercial harvest of rattlesnakes. The bill enabled the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks to issue rattlesnake hunting, dealer and buyer licenses for only the western third of Kansas.

“This is something Kansas City, Topeka and Wichita can’t touch,” Withers said.

The Kansas Herpetological Society, an organization dedicated to conserving and increasing awareness of amphibians and reptiles, opposed the bill. The society called the roundups “cruel, destructive and dangerous.”

Eric Rundquist, an animal science technician at Kansas University, researches prairie rattlesnakes in Barber County, along the Oklahoma border.

“The population of rattlesnakes in western Kansas took a huge nosedive 12 years ago,” Rundquist said. Though the cause for the decline is unknown, he said, the roundups certainly don’t help.

“For them,” Rundquist said, “it’s strictly economics.”

The society still opposes the roundups, but is no longer fighting them publicly.

“We gave it our best shot back in 1993,” Rundquist said.