The mules at Pea Ridge jump from a dead stop. Each one is led to the bar bareback and brought to a standstill, then asked to clear it flat-footed — the handler allowed spoken commands and a tug on the reins, nothing more, two tries at each height. The bar hangs under a tarp so the mule can see what it's being asked over: the coon hunter's blanket thrown over a wire fence, rebuilt in steel. That's where this began. Men who hunted together staged the first jump at the town's 1985 fall festival, and it has held the second Saturday in October ever since, 2020 alone missing. It passed through four organizers rather than lapse, landing with the city's Parks Commission in 2002. The show record was set early and stands: in 1989, Don Sams's mule Sonny, 50.5 inches at the shoulder, cleared 72 — a jump the Encyclopedia of Arkansas puts half an inch short of the world record then standing. Every rider and handler enters free by rule; the five-dollar gate falls on the spectators. Fourteen of the eighteen classes carry points, and those points decide the belt buckles named for Negel Hall, one of the 1985 founders. The buckles are handed out before the professional jump ever runs. That class closes the day and scores nothing. The Parks Commission inaugurated it in 2003 with a $1,000 purse, and by the next October a winning mule had come in from Virginia for it. Even the apparatus is a family matter: the founding Shockley family hauls in the jump standard each October, and the event's chairman told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette there'd be no event without them. It runs one Saturday a year, on a field just north of Pea Ridge City Hall. Every choice in it costs the day some spectacle, and every one is kept.