“It was just dumb as hell,” the photographer Jeremiah M. Murphy tells me. “I have rules, and I broke one of my rules.” Murph, as he’s known to those who know him, is recounting an accident during a wild-horse race some years ago at the Rosebud Wacipi, Fair & Rodeo, in South Dakota.

A wild-horse race is one of those sporting events that’s hard to believe ever existed, much less persists in the age of personal-injury lawyers. The goal is to saddle and ride unbroken horses as fast as possible, typically in under two minutes, and what makes it particularly crazy is that teams of cowboys, half a dozen or more, compete simultaneously. This means that some twenty or thirty people are running around the arena in teams of three, wrestling horses at the same time: the shanker holds a rope to restra

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