Pickett, Bill 1870–1932

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Bill Pickett 1870–1932

Rodeo cowboy

Few entertainers have equalled the legendary Bill Pickett for bravery, showmanship, or physical prowess. A member of the National Cowboy Hall of Fame, Pickett spent most of his life touring in Wild West shows, “bulldogging” steers and performing other rodeo stunts in front of huge audiences in the United States, Canada, and Europe. The height of his fame came at a time when few blacks performed in show business, but Pickett never disguised his race or played the buffoon. Instead he earned immense respect and a good degree of awe for his ability to pursue longhorn steers and wrestle them to the ground-sometimes without using his hands. In his bookGuts: Legendary Black Rodeo Cowboy Bill Pickett, Cecil Johnson called Pickett “a genuine American hero, a man of courage and dignity, who did some incredible things that all Americans, white, black, and otherwise, should know about.”

Some historians estimate that one in every four cowboys in the American West was of African origin. Black men were often given the job of driving cattle as plantation slaves. Indeed, some of the cattle ranching practices used in America had their origins in the ranching traditions of African peoples. After the Emancipation Proclamation, good black cowboys could always find work breaking horses, driving cattle to market, branding stock, and patrolling the huge ranches in Texas and Oklahoma. The work was extremely dangerous, rigorous, dirty, and sometimes lonely, but it provided a good living and was far less tedious and confining than a job in a factory or a cotton field.

Cowboys tended to train their sons to the profession, but Bill Pickett seems to have picked up cowboy ways in partnership with his brothers. He was born in Travis County, Texas, about 30 miles northwest of Austin, in 1870 and was the second oldest in a family of 13 children. His father, Thomas Jefferson Pickett, was a former slave, and his mother, Mary Pickett, was part Cherokee Indian. When Bill was still a baby, his family moved to Austin. There he attended public school through the fifth grade-an accomplishment in a time when schooling was poor, especially for blacks. Even as a youngster Pickett began to earn pocket change working odd jobs at the ranches surrounding Austin. By the time he was 18, and the family moved again to smaller Taylor, Texas, he was able to help support his siblings with his earnings as a ranch hand.

At a Glance…

Born December 5,1870, in Travis County, TX; died after being kicked by a horse, April 2, 1932 (some sources say March 23, 1932), in Pcmca City, OK; son of Thomas Jefferson and Mary Virginia Elizabeth (Gilbert) Pickett; married Maggie Turner, December 2, 1890; children: Nannie, Bessie, Leona, Willie, KleoraViiginia, Almarie, and Alberdia (all daughters). Education: Attended school through fifth grade.

Ranch hand near Taylor, TX, e 1880-88; professional rodeo and Wild West Show performer, 1888-1930, principally with the 101 Ranch and Wild West Show (1905-27); when not performing, worked as hand on 101 Ranch, Ponca City, OK.

Selected awards inducted into National Cowboy Hall of Fame, 1971; Pickett’s likeness appeared on a 29-cent stampin the’LegendsoftheWesf issue, 1993; a bronze statue of Pickett stands at the North Fort Worth Historical Society, Fort Worth, TX.

Invented “Bulldogging”

In the late 1880s, five of the Pickett brothers joined forces and opened their own stock business in Taylor. Their principal job was breaking wild horses, an extremely tricky occupation that required patience, strength, and a sophisticated knowledge of animal psychology. Some horses would fight for days before allowing a rider to stay on their backs, and the Pickett brothers were always in danger of being kicked, bitten, or bucked off. Nevertheless, the brothers became known for their abilities--and they had a reputation for not mistreating the animals.

Perhaps as a result of his bronco-busting activities-or perhaps from some infection he caught-Bill Pickett one day awoke to find himself completely blind. By that time he had married and was responsible for several young children. The ailment persisted for a year, proving very trying for the family, and then it disappeared as suddenly as it had come. The lasting effect of the blindness, for Pickett, was a fatalistic attitude he expressed as “What’s gonna happen, gonna happen.” What happened to Bill Pickett is the stuff of legend.

No one knows when Pickett bulldogged his first steer, but he is universally recognized as the originator of the sport. As a boy he spent much time on ranches observing the relationship between cattle and the bulldogs used to control them. Pickett noticed that dogs weighing less than fifty pounds could bring half-ton steers to their knees by biting the steers’ lips and holding on. One day, in pursuit of a wayward cow, Pickett threw himself onto the animal’s neck, grabbed it by the horns, twisted its face upwards, and took hold of its upper lip just as the dogs had. The ploy worked, and soon the cow was lying on its side in complete submission. Pickett called his maneuver “bulldogging.”

At first Pickett put bulldogging to use only to control animals that were being herded or shipped in rail cars to the slaughterhouses. Another idea occurred to him when he saw how people stared at his accomplishment. Beginning around the turn of the century, he began to put on bulldogging exhibitions at county fairs and with small rodeo companies, and soon he made a name for himself not as a ranch hand or bronc buster but as an entertainer.

One of Pickett’s first rodeo managers was a rancher named Lee Moore. Moore was the first to take Pickett’s demonstration out of Texas into neighboring states such as Kansas and Oklahoma. Everywhere Pickett went he caused a sensation. In 1903 Pickett signed on with another manager, Doug McClure, who liked to give his performers nicknames. Thus, in McClure’s promotional materials, Pickett became “The Dusky Demon,” a tag that, according to Cecil Johnson, “suggested that Pickett possessed some kind of supernatural powers that enabled him to cast a spell on the steers. The demon characterization also may have served to explain to the spectators the apparent disproportion between Pickett’s physical stature and the sizes of the animals he handled with such dexterity.” Pickett was a mere five-foot-seven and weighed about 145 pounds. Many of the animals he bulldogged topped out at 1,000 to 1,200 pounds.

In 1905 Pickett’s friend Will Rogers introduced the “Dusky Demon” to Zack Miller, co-owner of the magnificent 101 Ranch in Bliss, Oklahoma. Miller was looking for talent to fill the roster of a new Wild West show he was planning, and he had heard about Pickett from another Miller brother who had seen Pickett’s bulldogging act. Miller persuaded Pickett to come to the 101 Ranch and join its show as a featured performer. The offer was sweetened by the promise of a full-time job on the ranch during the off-season.

Thus began one of the longest and most fruitful partnerships in the history of Wild West shows. Pickett, still known as the “Dusky Demon,” became one of the featured acts in the Miller Brothers 101 Ranch Real Wild West Show. The show itself was a spectacular affair, at various times employing as many as 1,100 people and more than 600 animals-everything from the mundane to the exotic-as well as Sioux and Snake Indians, a troupe of Russian Imperial Cossacs, and rodeo riders and ropers. For the first few years with the 101 Ranch show, Pickett bulldogged longhorn steers with his teeth as he had in his early days. When various humane societies cited him for cruelty to animals, he modified his act into the sort of cattle wrestling seen in rodeos today--only the steers he wrestled were by some estimates twice the size.

Pickett’s fame took a quantum leap on December 23, 1908 in Mexico City, Mexico. Having traveled south with the 101 Ranch show-and having performed his bulldogging for Mexican audiences-Pickett became the center of an avalanche of negative publicity. Mexicans who held their sport of bullfighting in high esteem were shocked to see a black man jump from his horse and wrestle steers to the ground using little more than his teeth. The Mexican press printed remarks by Zack Miller to the effect that no bullfighter was as tough as Pickett, that Pickett could probably ride one of the meanest Mexican bulls, or throw two steers in the time it would take the best bullfighter to throw just one.

A challenge was levelled: Mexico’s leading bullfighters wagered 5,000 pesos that Pickett could not stay on the back of one of their fighting bulls for five minutes. Pickett accepted the challenge, and a crowd of more than 25,000 hostile Mexicans crowded into the city’s new bullring to watch him. Pickett was used to hearing cheers and applause for his labors. This crowd wanted him to be killed and booed him lustily. His pride hurt, the cowboy proceeded to accomplish the feat at great peril to his own life and at the cost of having his favorite horse gored. In the end, Pickett stayed on the bull five minutes but was injured by bricks and bottles thrown by the crowd. He suffered several broken ribs and narrowly missed being trampled by the animal after his injuries led him to lose his grip on its horns. Nevertheless, his victory was apparent even to the hostile crowd, and in the United States the event made headlines everywhere.

New Horizons for the Show

Between 1910 and 1914 Pickett performed almost continuously with the 101 Ranch show, appearing in arenas such as Madison Square Garden in New York, Boston Garden, and the Chicago Coliseum. At various times he shared billing with the likes of Will Rogers and Tom Mix, both of whom would go on to fame in motion pictures. As far as the Wild West show went, however, Pickett was the bigger star. Because the show was so large that it needed its own train, he rarely encountered the kind of racism that other black performers faced at the turn of the century: he had first-class accommodations on Miller’s train and was admitted to hotels with the rest of the company. When racist members of audiences turned on him occasionally, he would quickly be surrounded by fellow cowboys of both races who called him a comrade.

Nowhere was Pickett treated better than in Europe. The 101 Ranch Real Wild West Show made a journey abroad in 1914, performing in England before some members of the royal family. Pickett’s performance was so impressive that he found himself invited to white-tie dinners in some of the country’s biggest mansions. The natives of Paris were equally enthralled. Unfortunately, the onset of World War I sent the show back to America prematurely, and all of its animals were requisitioned by the British government.

The onset of vaudeville and motion pictures robbed the Wild West shows of bigger audiences, and after a brief appearance in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in 1917, Pickett restricted his cattle wrestling to rodeos. By the time Pickett switched from exhibition bulldogging to competition bulldogging, he had many younger imitators, such as Milt Hinkle, who often rode off with the prize money at the rodeos. As for Pickett, he made two short film documentaries, The Bulldogger in 1923 and The Crimson Skull in 1924. A copy of The Bu lldogger has made the records at the Library of Congress, and it provides fine footage of Pickett performing his specialty as well as roping and riding.

Between 1920 and 1924 Pickett spent more time working on ranches than performing in rodeos and exhibitions. In 1924, at the age of 55, he was named to the cast of a revived Miller Brothers Wild West Show that was expensively mounted but failed to turn a profit. When the show folded, Pickett returned to his home near the 101 Ranch in Ponca City, Oklahoma, and resumed his duties as a ranch hand for the Miller Brothers.

“What’s Gonna Happen, Gonna Happen”

As Bill Pickett entered his sixties, he was remarkably spry and healthy, considering his long years as a bulldogger. He lived long enough to see his beloved 101 Ranch fall into foreclosure, and it was that event that hastened his own end. On the day that the ranch was put up for auction, Pickett was sent with a few other ranch hands to separate the few horses Zack Miller could keep from a larger herd that would be sold. In the process of completing this task, the 62-year-old Pickett was kicked in the head by a half-wild sorrel. He was rushed to the hospital in Ponca City, but he never regained consciousness. After lying in a coma for eight days, he died on April 2, 1932. He was buried just outside the boundaries of the 101 Ranch in a cemetery that also holds the remains of the great Ponca chief White Eagle.

Had Bill Pickett been a white man, he would have been inducted into the National Cowboy Hall of Fame early in its existence. Most rodeo historians agree that no single performer contributed more to the complicated series of rodeo events than did Pickett with his bulldogging techniques. As it was, Pickett was finally named to the Hall in 1971, almost 40 years after his death.

Another tribute in 1993 brought its own share of controversy. Pickett was chosen to grace a 29-cent postage stamp in the much-heralded “Legends of the West” issue. However, when the stamps were released, scholars noticed that the picture of Pickett was not Bill Pickett, but rather his brother Ben. The entire run of stamps was recalled, but not before a few had been sold. This caused an enormous controversy among stamp collectors, who clamored for the original issue. In the end, a limited number of sheets with the picture of Ben Pickett were sold to satisfy collectors. The rest, with the real Bill Pickett pictured, came on the market a few weeks later. If Bill Pickett had been all but forgotten as a tum-of-the-century cowboy, he became legendary once again as the featured face on an incorrect postage stamp.

Pickett’s legacy has outlived any racist attempts to sabotage it, and today he is widely recognized as one of the finest cowboys in the history of the American West. As Johnson put it, “Many insist that [Pickett] was without debate the greatest all-around work and show business cowboy ever to straddle a horse…. He was the quintessence of the American cowboy.”