Blast from the past: Bill Pickett led the way for Black cowboys.
cowboy carnival. Howe may have known almost nothing about cowboys, but like the 20,000 others in attendance, he recognized that he had seen something extraordinary.
At the end of the Civil War, Texas’s Juneteenth proclamation had freed more than 200,000 enslaved Texans; some established their own farming communities and others hired out as cowboys. Pickett’s parents were slaves, already skilled with livestock, who’d traveled in a caravan from South Carolina to Texas in 1854. They had thirteen children, including Bill, who was born on December 5, 1870, in Travis County.
In early 1905, months after his breakthrough performance at Cheyenne Frontier Days, Zack Miller of Oklahoma’s famoustraveled to Fort Worth to watch Pickett bulldog two steers. He quickly recruited Pickett for a grand show the Millers had planned: The National Editors Association was having its big convention in Guthrie, Oklahoma, that year, and the 101 Ranch was feeding the appetite for mythical Wild West entertainments even as the real cowboy West declined.
But Pickett’s most famous achievement occurred three years later in Mexico City, when the 101 Ranch Wild West show landed there in December 1908. Show organizers had expected the usual crowd approval, but in Mexico bullfighting was king — not American rodeo, and certainly not wrestling with bulls — and ticket sales were disappointing.
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