Photos from 100 years ago show cowboys on horseback lining Gunnison’s main street, which was dirt in those days.

Tyler Hansen likes to look at these photos, to see his western Colorado hometown how it used to be.

“It was just an Old West town,” he said.

For a week every July, Gunnison resembles that again.

Those old photos show the early Cattlemen’s Days, which today calls itself the “Granddaddy of Colorado Rodeos.” It’s known as the state’s longest-running rodeo, dating to 1900. Just as local ranchers came together back then for riding and roping as part of a fun-filled break in the busy summer, so they do today.

Cattlemen’s Days has grown into more than a rodeo. Along with the traditional parade, the week sees locals showing horses and livestock, barrel racing and wrangling. They bid at the auction, laugh at the funny man and enjoy the carnival rides. They read poetry and sing songs that honor an old way of life.

Hansen knows that way of life well. He’s a fourth-generation rancher in the Gunnison Valley, tending to horses and cows like his great-grandparents who settled here in the late 1800s.

And like his father and uncle before him, Hansen is president of Cattlemen’s Days. His mother was a rodeo queen. Other family members have helped organize the parade and have served breakfast to tired ranchers ready for merriment.

“It just brings us back to what brought us all to this valley,” Hansen said. “It was cattle country and cowboy country.”

It was previously fields of sage, a rancher recalled in a documentary chronicling the history of Cattlemen’s Days.

“These hay meadows we look at and think they’re natural, they weren’t,” Paul Manning said.

They were established along with irrigation ditches. And along with hay, beef became a top commodity here in the valley near major mining populations.

Coal and gold would boom and bust. But the cowboys remained ー and they made themselves known one celebratory week in July.

Recalled another rancher, Lawrence Phelps, in that documentary: “These old cowboys started Cattlemen’s Days because of the fact that the irrigating season was over, they had the cattle on the high range and they were getting ready to cut hay. So they had a blast before that all started.”

Generations followed suit, through world wars and the Great Depression, through social and political strife and through economic highs and lows. No matter what, “everybody has a lot of fun,” Phelps said. “It’s against the law to work around here on Cattlemen’s Days week.”

The event went by other names in the early 1900s: Pioneer Celebration and Helldorado Stampede. From Gunnison’s dirt streets, cowboys and cowgirls moved to the track and stands of Colorado Normal School, now Western Colorado University.

“What a celebration,” the local newspaper remarked then, noting “cattlemen, merry-go-rounds, cowpunchers, popcorn, horses, ice cream, more cowpunchers, red silk handkerchiefs, people, cars, races, brass bands, an eight-legged calf, snakes …”

Festivities moved to the current fairgrounds in the 1930s. That decade, organizers partnered with the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association to lure top talent beyond the valley, launching the level of competition seen today.

“There’s still a small-town, down-home rodeo feel to it, but we bring in the big names,” Hansen said.

He’s but one with fond childhood memories of Cattlemen’s Days who has spent his adulthood volunteering. The goal for him and others: “To keep it going for the next generation.”

Spectators today might not notice any cultural change from Gunnison’s past. But indeed, “it’s changed,” Hansen said. “It’s changed a lot.”

The valley is now home to a Vail Resorts-owned destination in Crested Butte, and other forms of outdoor recreation fuel the local economy.

“Now there are fewer and fewer ranches year after year,” Hansen said.

They’ve been bought by wealthy outsiders seeking vacation getaways. Hansen doesn’t blame this generation for selling, these great-grandsons and great-granddaughters who know all too well what he knows: “It’s hard to make a living with a cow.”

His family’s original ranch was sold a few years ago. “We bought a small ranch, but it’s not a full-time occupation like it used to be,” Hansen said.

To pay the bills, he drives a truck. That “allows my wife and boys to be able to stay home and play with the cows and horses and all that good stuff,” he said.

He still tends to the animals, still rides with his two sons, ages 5 and 3.

And like their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents before them, they’ll be testing their skills at Cattlemen’s Days.

“Most people think 3 is pretty young,” Hansen said. “But both of them are riding horses and swinging ropes.”