Tom Glass was an American chuckwagon racing competitor who spent decades in one of the most distinctly western sporting traditions, building a career on the chuckwagon racing circuit of the American and Canadian West and earning recognition as a knowledgeable and committed figure in a sport that preserves the working skills of the nineteenth-century cattle industry in competitive form. He died at the age of 77 in 2026, having devoted a large portion of his adult life to the sport that connected him to the western ranching tradition he had grown up in and loved.
He was born in 1948 or 1949 in the American West, growing up in the region where the cattle ranching tradition that chuckwagon racing celebrates was a living part of the economy and culture rather than a historical artifact. The American West of the mid-twentieth century, where ranching families maintained working operations that used horses and the equipment associated with range cattle management even as mechanisation was transforming the work, gave people growing up in that environment a direct connection to the traditions that chuckwagon racing had formalised into competition. He came to the sport through that background, developing the horsemanship and the knowledge of wagon harness and equipment that serious chuckwagon competition requires.
Chuckwagon racing as a organised sport originated in Canada and has its most prestigious institutional home at the Calgary Stampede, the world’s largest outdoor rodeo that hosts the Rangeland Derby, the world professional championship of the sport, each July. The competitive format requires that each outfit, consisting of a driver and four outriders, start from the infield, set up the camp cookstove in a defined pattern behind the wagon, complete the required turns around barrels in the infield, and then race the full circuit of the track. The combination of the infield camp break, which rewards the organisation and smoothness of the wagon crew, and the track race, which tests the horses’ speed and the driver’s ability to find the best line through the competition, creates a sport whose demands span both the practical skills of the working camp cook and the competitive skills of a harness racing driver.
He competed in chuckwagon racing across the American and Canadian circuit, attending major events and building the competitive record and the community relationships that define a serious career in the sport. The chuckwagon racing community is a close-knit world of families and individuals for whom the sport is both a competitive pursuit and a cultural commitment to the traditions that chuckwagon racing embodies, and the relationships within that community are sustained across decades by the shared experience of competition and the shared commitment to the horse and wagon tradition that the sport celebrates.
After his competitive career ended he remained active in the chuckwagon racing community, maintaining the connections and involvement that give former competitors a continued role in the tradition they have been part of. His death in 2026 at 77 was mourned by the western racing community that had known him across decades of involvement in a sport that is genuinely unique to the cultural landscape of the western North American tradition. He was 77 years old.