Rodeo champion Rusty Wright’s big comeback didn’t start with a wild bronc or record-setting ride. It began between rides, in the dust and noise of Cheyenne Frontier Days when a stranger asked him to do a quick interview for a documentary about barrel racing legend Angela Ganter. 

They wanted him to talk about something he feels strongly about — the importance of women in the rodeo world.

“I’ve got a pretty strong opinion about it, so I figured I’d go ahead and do it,” said the saddle bronc champ. “I didn’t expect it to be as big of a deal as it turned out being. I was passionate about it, and they loved that, so I think the interview went a little longer than it was supposed to.”

His off-the-cuff, passionate interview would become what Wyoming filmmaker Raen LeVell describes as the “beating heart” of his “Outriding the Devil,” a film he believes is well on its way to becoming a grassroots rodeo blockbuster.

It’s enjoyed a multi-week run as the No. 1-ranked Western documentary on IMDb and earned major praise from national outlets like Sports Illustrated. 

It’s also gained elite backing from professional rodeo leaders, who have given it prime screenings at some of the sport’s biggest venues, including the National Finals Rodeo.

Women Behind Rodeo’s Biggest Champions

Ask Wright who the real heroes of rodeo are, and he’ll point first to the women — those who compete in the arena and the ones who never step inside of it.

In his Cheyenne interview, he poured his heart out about his own mother, ShaRee Wright, and all of the other rodeo moms and wives who help keep riders like himself going. 

“They asked me what my mom meant to me, and the things she’s done for me in my career,” he said. “Everybody hears how our dad helped us along. He gets lots of recognition, which he should. 

“But I don’t feel like my mom or the wives behind the scenes ever really get the recognition they deserve. Honestly, I think it should be just as much as what my dad would get.”

If there were gold buckles for “backbone of the family,” Rusty said he’s convinced his mom would have several of those.

The deep respect for women behind the chutes is exactly the kind of authenticity LeVell was hoping to capture in his film, from Ganter’s story to the moms and wives behind the scenes.

Ganter’s ‘Red Devil’ Comeback

“Outriding the Devil” focuses on the little-told comeback story of Ganter, a barrel racer whose stunning career slammed into a stage-four breast cancer diagnosis so advanced doctors told her she was unlikely to live.

But Ganter had always been a fighter and refused to give up. 

The chemotherapy that ultimately saved her has a telling nickname, though. It’s called the “red devil,” and it wreaks havoc on the human body in its quest to ultimately save it.

There were days Ganter couldn’t walk from her bedroom to the living room. After chemo like that, almost no one believed Ganter would even be able to ride a horse again, much less fight her way back to compete at an elite level. 

“That red devil chemo had road-graded her nervous system,” LeVell said. “She had lost her balance. She didn’t really know left from right. So the idea that she would get on a horse and be able to just kind of like work on a horse was a little fanciful, and the thought that she would come back to rodeo was kind of like Disney-line stuff.”

And yet, Ganter not only survived, but she returned to rodeo at the highest levels, finding a special horse named Bugs and clawing her way back to champion-caliber barrel racing. 

Lighting A Fire Under Rusty Wright’s Comeback

For Wright, who hadn’t known the full depth of Ganter’s ordeal until that Cheyenne interview, her resilience ended up lighting a fire right when he needed it most.

“When I did that interview, honestly, I was kind of right in the middle of my own personal issues and stuff,” he said. “I went from, you know, top of the world — I was reserve world champion in 2018 — and then I had a bunch of personal struggles. I wasn’t even making finals one year. I wasn’t even top 50.”

Learning what Ganter had overcome helped him push the reset button.

“You start playing the ‘poor me’ game, and if you open your eyes and look around, everyone’s got something,” he said. “You sitting there crying about your problems, that isn’t going to help you get out of them. 

“A lot of people have it a lot worse off than I do, and they made it. They conquered it. So that kind of lit that fire under me to get my stuff together, and you know, set my goals, realign my priorities, and away we went.”

From NFR To Wyoming

After its premiere at the National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas — the Super Bowl of Western sports — “Outriding the Devil” has hit the rodeo trail. That’s included premiering at major Texas events like RodeoHouston and the San Angelo Stock Show & Rodeo.

Now after making waves on a national stage, the film is circling back to where Rusty’s turning point began — Wyoming. The film will have an especially long runway in the Cowboy State with several free premieres ahead.

It will open the College National Finals Rodeo in Casper on June 13, making it one of the rare films to both premiere as an official event of the NFR and later open the college finals as well. 

From there, it heads to Sheridan for the WYO Rodeo kickoff on July 5 and then to Cheyenne Frontier Days, where it will premiere July 16. 

All of these shows will be free to the public thanks to Visit Casper, the Wyoming Foundation for Cancer Care, the WYO Rodeo, and the Gold Buckle Club. 

These Wyoming events will also be the last chances to see “Outriding the Devil” on the big screen, and they’ll include opportunities to quiz the director and rodeo figures after the show.

Streaming deals are being negotiated for a wider, national release, but premiere-style events will end once those begin.

True Meaning Of Grit

The Wright family is considered rodeo royalty by many, and has been an integral part of “Outriding the Devil,” LeVell said. 

During the Las Vegas premiere, the Wrights were there in force alongside country music stars and “Yellowstone” actors, including Mo Brings Plenty. 

One of those stars was Ned LeDoux, who plays a young Ganter’s uncle in the movie opposite Lily Wright, who is Stetson Wright’s sister.

In the film, Rusty’s brother, Stetson Wright, takes viewers inside the chute as he walks through his mental processes before a ride. 

Rusty, meanwhile, talks about the importance of family sticking together and why he sees rodeo as “one big family.”

Rodeo is one of America’s most dangerous and physically demanding sports. It takes a certain mindset to keep going, one that’s hard to sustain without family and friends backing it up.

“Everybody always sees our highlights and our wins on social media,” he said. “Everyone talks about our wins and yeah, that’s inspiring and everything. But to me the real inspiration, what gets me fired up, is seeing people’s struggles and what they had to go through to get there.”

Rusty said it took 50-some horses before he could stay on a bronc at all, and probably 300 horses before it finally started to click.

“I remember that moment when it finally clicked for me and I thought, ‘Oh, that’s how it’s supposed to feel,’” he said. “If people could watch how many dirt naps and how many wrecks I got in getting to where I’m at, I guarantee you, most people would be like, ‘I can’t believe he’s still riding.’”

By showing those struggles, Rusty hopes his own kids will realize that whatever they want to do in life, they can do it.

“It doesn’t matter what you’ve been through, or what you go through,” he said. “If you work at it, buckle down, if you stay hooked, you can get your way to the top.”

That’s the larger message he sees in Ganter’s story, too, and it’s one he absorbed thanks to a random interview request at Cheyenne Frontier Days in Wyoming.

“I don’t really believe in coincidences,” he said. “I believe in faith. I was just walking by, and they’re like, ‘Hey, you want to come do this interview?’ God knew I needed that. He knew I needed to hear something, to give me that little push I needed.”

Now that push is on a much bigger stage, playing out in rodeo arenas and theaters across Wyoming and the West — an audience full of cowboys and cowgirls who know exactly what it means to get bucked off hard, dust off, and stand back up again in the arena. 

It’s no surprise that such a film would have a Wyoming director behind it, or that it would find its biggest runway in the Cowboy State, where grit has become part of the local DNA.

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.

Several local cowboys and cowgirls competed in the Wyoming High School State Finals at the Johnson County Fairgrounds in Buffalo Friday, June 5, 2026. This was fourth performance of the three-day event.

Photos by Clint Wood

CHEYENNE — Patricia Miller was helping another customer when a smooth-talking gentleman came in and quickly grabbed some crystals that he said were a gift for his mom. 

“He was trying to small talk with me about how wonderful of a person he was, because he’s getting them for her,” Miller told Cowboy State Daily. “And he’s going to print out information about each one of them, and all this other stuff.”

Miller thought that was sweet and said so, but what happened next was anything but sweet.

“He handed me this $100 bill, and I could feel that something was different,” she said. “And I was looking at it, and I’m like, ‘Well, maybe it’s old?’”

That prompted the man to helpfully add that the bill was from 1996.

That’s when things clicked for Miller.

“Like, who knows what year the bill is that you’re handing a cashier?” she said. “So that’s what really triggered my mind to be like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is counterfeit.’”

Not wanting to falsely accuse the man — or ignite a confrontation — Miller took a different tack. 

“I said to him, ‘I”m sorry, but I don’t have change for this. You’re going to have to maybe get change and come back. Do you have anything smaller?’” Miller said. “And he said, ‘No, I’ll go to Bomgaars and get change.’”

The man never returned for his items. 

Later, looking at the store’s video surveillance, Miller saw the man had several recognizable bags with him. When she visited those other stores, it confirmed her suspicion that the $100 bill had been fake. 

The same man with the same story and multiple copies of the same $100 bill, all sharing the same serial number, had hit all of the stores.

Same Serial Number All Over Town

Miller’s social media post about the experience drew jeers from some skeptical online commenters who accused her of overreacting. 

She posted the bill so others would know what was happening, to prevent anyone from getting duped.

A manager at a discount store on South Greeley Highway in Cheyenne, who asked that her store not be named for corporate reasons, confirmed she’d encountered both the same man and the same $100 bill as Miller. 

The man came to the store on South Greeley between the hours of 3:30 and 4 p.m., she said, trying to buy some baby wipes and a gallon jug of water with the $100 — a classic, small-purchase, big-change tactic.

The cashier felt something was off with the bill, but couldn’t identify what. She used a traditional counterfeit detector pen. If the iodine ink, which reacts with starches in standard, wood-pulp paper, remains black, that’s supposed to indicate that a bill is real. 

But the manager has learned a different trick to identify counterfeits lately. 

“I swabbed it with rubbing alcohol, and the ink smudged,” she said. “So I told him it was fake and we were not going to accept it.”

When the cashier told the man the bill was fake, he said, “Keep it,” and walked out, by then visibly trying to hide his face from the camera.

“That confirms to me that it was fake,” the manager said. 

The bill has been turned over to Laramie County Sheriff’s Office for further investigation.

Bleached Bills Fool Counterfeit Pens

The discount store manager said counterfeiters have come up with a smart strategy to fool the traditional iodine counterfeit detector pens.

What they do is bleach a $1 bill, and then print a $100 bill over the top of it. Because it’s genuine currency paper, the iodine pens won’t catch that the bill is fake. 

“The counterfeit pens are garbage,” the manager said. “You can write on that and it won’t catch it because it is in fact money paper, just not the right denomination.”

She prefers that her employees use rubbing alcohol to test the ink. If it smudges, that’s a huge red flag.

She also has them hold the bill up to the light, to look for water marks and other security features that $100 bills have that $1 bills do not.

The last check is the texture of the bill itself, which is slightly changed by the bleaching process. 

“When we held it up, it did not have a water mark in it,” she said. “It did not have a face in it, and I felt no texture on the bill itself.”

A Prop Money In Riverton

In Riverton, meanwhile, funny money has taken a slightly different tack, with Hollywood-style prop bills circulating around town.

At Blossoms and Boba Cafe, owner Jesica Fritz told Cowboy State Daily a group of children roughly ages 10-13 came in for a shopping spree with what they thought was a genuine $100 bill, given to them by a friendly stranger who had encouraged them to spend all of the money in one place. 

“One of the girls who works for us thought it was real at first,” Fritz said. “It did look very realistic, unless you read it and looked closely at it.

“The other girl, my daughter, was like, ‘No, absolutely this is not real. Look, it doesn’t even say, ‘In God we trust.”

Instead the bill said, “In Prop we Trust,” and elsewhere, in tiny fine print, it identified the money as a film prop, not for legal tender.

Fritz said her cafe does use counterfeit detection pens and also trains staff to hold bills up to make sure the paper shimmers correctly, and to look closely at fine print and seals.

“If you’re slammed and super busy and someone just hands one of these to you, I can totally understand why some people would take it as regular money,” she said. “It looks very realistic.”

The children had already paid for their Boba teas before trying to use the fake $100 for extra items. When told the bill wasn’t real, they were crestfallen, but cooperative.

“The kids legitimately believed they had real money, and were super stoked about it,” Fritz said. 

Staying Ahead Of Funny Money

Fritz turned the bill over to the Riverton Police Department. 

The department did not return Cowboy State Daily’s request for comment, but Fritz said they told her that several other businesses in town had also seen prop money circulating.

Cheyenne police, meanwhile, said it has seven reports of counterfeit bills being passed around at local businesses so far this year. 

“The counterfeit bills we encounter the most are $20 and $100 denominations,” said department spokeswoman Alexandra Farkas. “Many of the fake $100 bills are novelty bills intended for film production and are marked with the phrase, ‘For Motion Picture Purposes.’”

That can be easy to overlook during a busy transaction, Farkas acknowledged.

“If counterfeit currency is seized and is not associated with an active local investigation, our Property and Evidence Division will send it to the U.S. Secret Service for further investigation,” she said. “For more information about identifying counterfeit bills, the Secret Service offers educational resources online at www.secretservice.gov.”

By policy, businesses are supposed to try to retain suspicious bills and turn them over to police. But both Miller and the discount store manager admitted they considered their own personal safety first and foremost. 

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.