In Black America; Guts: Legendary Black Rodeo Cowboy Bill Pickett, with Cecil Johnson

Music From the Longhorn Radio Network, the University of Texas at Austin, this is In Black America. What I view Pickett is doing is this is the door opener that's going to really trigger even more interest in other cowboys, other black cowboys.

That's what I view. Because he's a name people throw around. Almost everybody has heard Bill Pickett, but nobody knows that thing about it. So I did this and I think this is going to spur interest like another guy. Pick, that was a very story. Does the name George Glean mean anything to you? No, I think so. George Glean was a black cowboy who worked on a ranch in Texas. And his boss took a herd up to Abelene. And his boss died up there. Oh, had a heart attack. And they buried him, bombed him and buried him up there. Well, George, when they got back, George said what he wanted to be buried here. So nobody else would go with him. So George Glean went all the way back up to Abelene in the wagon. All the body all the way back down to Texas and buried. It took him 42 days and got sick and it was just a terrible adventure. But that's not familiar to you. Yes, it does. No, some dub, right? Exactly. That's where the idea came from. Cecil Johnson, author of the new book entitled Guts, Legendary Black Rodeo Cowboy, Bill Pickett. Bill Pickett was an all around professional cowboy and rodeo champion for more than 40 years.

He performed in the circus, world fairs and wild west shows. His unmatched skills were displayed all around the world. During tours ranging from Mexico to Canada, he became known as the Dusty Demon, the Daredevil Negro, who rossled wild steers to the ground and held them there with his own Bulldog Strong Teeth. In 1993, the United States Postal Service paid tribute to Bill Pickett by honoring him in this legend of the West Postal Stamp Series, only to discover later that his 250 million pickett stamps pictured the wrong picket, Bill's younger brother, Ben. I'm John L. Hanson, Jr. and welcome to another edition of In Black America. This week, Guts, Legendary Black Rodeo Cowboy, Bill Pickett, with author Cecil Johnson in Black America. Our role in the West was, we just ridden out of it altogether.

We were ridden out by the movies, by history and everything. Well, of course, everyone knows about the Buffalo Soldiers now, but it's only recently that any attention was paid to them. And the Cowboys, there were a fifth to a quarter of them were Black that went up on the Chisholm Trail and the Western Trail and all of that. And the cowboy way for them was really a cut above farming and other things. They had more freedom and all of this, so there was more dignity in being a cowboy than there was and being working on a farm or something like that. But it's a part of our history that we need to know. We made a tremendous contribution to the West and the West is the really image of America that people all over the world know most about. More than 61 years since Bill Pickett's death in 1932, his story has taken on an aura that far exceeds the notoriety achieved during a career in which he performed worldwide

alongside the likes of Tom Mix and Real Rogers and before audiences that included Ingers Royalty. In 1905, Pickett along with Real Rogers risked their lives by riding into the grandstands at New York's Madison Square Garden to subdue a runaway steer. If you had read the New York newspapers, Pickett's was nowhere to be found. In 1991, Pickett became the first African-American inducted into the national cowboy rodeo Hall of Fame. His unique style of steer rassing involved him riding alongside a steer, throwing a steer on his back, grabbing his horns and twisting his neck, then he would bite the steer's lip, leap off the steer's back and fall backwards onto the ground, pulling the steer back with him. I recently spoke with Cecil Johnson, who has written a book about Bill Pickett. You know, in this business you have a choice of traveling from paper to paper or everything, but I stuck here because I had been everywhere actually before I came into journalism so I kind of liked Fort Worth and I didn't want to go anywhere else.

So I stayed here and I progressed up the ranks from my general assignments reporter to a government reporter and then into commentary, which is one of the elite positions, you know. To be, I'm on the editorial board, which decides the editorial stances of the paper. For those who are familiar with Fort Worth, it still is a cattle town, but is it more than just cowboys and cattle? Well, Fort Worth really isn't a cattle town. Quite frankly, it has this cattle heritage and we play on it, you know, for tourist sake. We have this stock or tourist attraction or the stock or it's used to be. But for several decades, our primary industry was government, you know. General dynamics and causal air force base. We can have a diversified economy, but cattle is not really a part of it. More oil than cattle, I would say, really. But this is how we get maintained our famous cow town. You're recently has written a book entitled Guts Legendary Black Road in your Cowboy Bill Pickett.

How did you come to the point that a book needed to be written by you concerning Bill Pickett? Well, I had come across snippets on Pickett in various places. Actually, there is one other book out about Bill Pickett, called Bill Pickett, bulldog or by Colonel Bailey Haines, but I was never satisfied with any of those things. I didn't think they portrayed him heroically, you know, the way he is. They kind of made him kind of a menstrual manlike thing, you know. He was sort of a foolhardy illiterate black, you know. Okay. A stereotype. And so I wanted to portray him as a real human being with dignity and guts, you know, courage, which is what he had, guts and extraordinary ability and strength. And when did you first get the idea of actually take the project on? Well, it was actually about 10 years ago. I didn't take me 10 years to write this, but it was about 10 years ago when I really started reading about him.

And I came across a thing somewhere in some of J. Frank Dobie's stuff that referred to his big adventure in Mexico City. And, hey, I said, this is fascinated. So a contact friend out at the Amon Carter Museum of Western Art. And he said, yeah, he had some of the old Mexico City newspapers from 1908 that told about this incident. And I went out in the archives and read those. And I just became fascinated with Pickett ever since. And the opportunity came up this year that it was really timely because of the big controversy over the wrong stamp, you know, about that? Correct. Right. And so I proposed this book to a publisher here. And they say, hey, this is a timely idea. And they went with it. Besides the information that you research, you also spoke with some family members. Right. Most of his ancestors still living here in Texas on the other parts of the country and world. Most of the other parts now, most of the direct descendants are, you have to go back and see, he had seven daughters.

So there's nobody really named Pickett really hard to write. And so my main source of information, really, who contacted all these other people was a guy named Frank Phillips, who wrote the... The forward to the book. And he is a great grandson of Bill Pickett. And so whenever I talk to somebody else about something, I always confer with him about it because he had the straight skinny for the most part. Yeah. So he became... I always check things out with him, you know. So he was my main source, even though I talked to some other of the descendants, because some of them had flaky memories. Also, I understand he was born relatively in Travis County, Texas, which is Austin. Yes, Austin area. Is that community still there? Yes. That's where he was born in 1870. Okay. How did Mr. Pickett become involved in becoming a cowboy, bulldog, and what have you?

Well, that's what he grew up doing as a kid, you know. That was the sound of times. That's what men did at that time. So what you call a brush popper, you know, that tough, miskept country down around in that area. And he was one of those real rough cowboys down there where it was a real terrible terrain, you know. With all this thorny miskeed and rattlesnakes big enough to swallow Jack Rapids. So some of the toughest cowboys in the world came right now. But he grew up working on ranches all around in that area. He actually moved from off from the Austin area to a tailor when he was about 17 or 18, I think. And that's where he worked at ranches all over the place. But even as a kid, he worked around cowboys and things. And he started practicing his famous trick when he was a kid on calves and things like that. You're matating a bulldog, you're not going to steer. One would think, considering the style of bulldogging, in which he invented,

that he would be a large man and statue. But the truth of the matter is, he went five foot seven. Yeah, way about 140 pounds. Right. But it tremendous strength. I mean, he once said that he could lift a 250 pounds sack of salt with one motion. I mean, you know, not kids just taking from the ground and pulling straight up, you know. And, you know, take a guy that kind of strength. That's remember, he wrestled a fighting bull in the bull ring in Mexico City to a standstill. Right. And I assume that particular exhibition was built that more than likely the bull would come out the better than Mr. Pickett. That's what everybody went there to see. They went there to see him get gold. A Yankee Indian couple of decades before that had attempted to do something like that, and it had just been brutally been torn all the pieces. But this thing was a result of a bet that was made by his bosses, you know.

And they just insulted the honor of all the bull fighting officials. And people came from everywhere, crammed the big arena there just to see Bill Pickett get killed. That was the whole reason for going there. They knew he was going to get killed. But he didn't. When did Pickett understand that his style of bulldogging and what he had had invented, he could actually earn a living doing that other than what he was normally doing as part of a ranch hand. I think he was, that was, that was in the 1880s. He was working on a ranch. Oh, I forget the guy's name at the time, but he was working on this ranch and he did his stunt. They were loading some cattle at the railhead to ship north. And one of the steers broke away and Pickett wrote out after it instead of just hurting it back, he jumped off his horse and stopped him. And then threw him down and held him down with his teeth.

And his boss thought this was a great thing and he had to show this thing around. So he carried him to county fairs and other exhibitions all around the state. And people paid money to see this and he split a little bit of it with Pickett. And it became his, the fame of this thing spread so that he decided to carry the act out of state. And they started touring New Mexico and Arizona and Oklahoma and all through those other, just all over the West. And the word just spread ahead of him. And eventually Pickett left him and went to a promoter who could do it even better. So by, within a few years, he was quite famous all over the West. Then became the big event here in Fort Worth when he met up with the Colonel Zach Miller of the 101 Ranch in Oklahoma. It was the biggest, well it produced the biggest Wild West show since Buffalo Bill. But this ranch was like a feudal kingdom, it was so big. And Pickett performed for them at a big exhibition they put on for an editorial convention,

news paper meant for all of the country. And they loved it so much that they signed him on for life, you know. They gave him a place for his family at the ranch and then he traveled with their show all over the world, even the England, Argentina, you know. The book is made up of 17 chapters. How did you decide the way you were going to name those chapters? And I'm quite sure you could include all the information that was available to you. No, they just sort of happened that sort of segmented it. I wanted to start with something that grabbed the reader immediately. I like to believe when I'm telling something to start in the middle. I started with him in Fort Worth with this meeting and then I flashed back to other things. It's what about the fourth chapter before I get to having him for back where he was born in Austin

and telling about his marriage and things of this sort. And I built everything up, my plan was to the middle chapter was to be that Mexico City thing because it was the biggest and most exciting thing he did. And then I trained off from there to the other adventure. When did we begin seeing the Bill Pickett rodeo? Is that an advent of the 20th century? That actually started about 11 years ago, a guy named Lou Vassan out of Denver. And even as we speak, I'm looking at a big yellow, red, black, and purple poster advertising the final of the Bill Pickett rodeo at the Caltown Coliseum in Fort Worth on Friday, December 16th. And Saturday, December 17th, we're going to have that here. I'm going to be there signing copies of my book, this other thing. When was Pickett inducted into the national rodeo cowboy hall of fame in Oklahoma City? That was 1971. That's a long time.

He was considering that he died in 1932. There was a lot of, obviously, there was some racism that played a part in it. Okay. You spoke about the big mix-up, the 1993 commemorative series of Legend of the West and God only knows how the U.S. postal system inadvertently put Bill's younger brother picture for himself in that series. But God and his infamous wisdom must have a grand plan because since that time, Bill Pickett somewhat has become a household name. Absolutely. It couldn't work out better. This picture, though, that they used a bin had been identified as Bill in a number of books and magazine articles. And it's written on there. This is Bill Pickett. And so the artist, who was going to do the portrait for the postal service, looked at all the pictures he had and said, hey, this is the best looking picture.

He went with that because Ben is much better looking than Bill after all. Yeah. Who caught the mistake? I don't know exactly which of the descendants did, but someone caught it up in Oklahoma on a public television station. And then the news first broke in an Oklahoma City paper. And then Frank Phillips was contacted about it. And then Frank Phillips carried the ball after that. Just pushed hard to force them to recall it. And Frank Phillips led the campaign to get a recall. And they, in turn, recalled all of them. And this created the first of them. Are you familiar with the Lin-Stamp news? Yes. This thing dominated all year. It dominated the columns of Lin-Stamp news. I didn't know that the stamp collectors were so rabid. But anyway, he recalled all the stamps, and there was such a furor created that a compromise was struck,

under which 150,000 of the erroneous stamps were re-released in order to satisfy collectors. And then the rest were destroyed. Those erroneous stamps, they charged a little more to recover the cost of those stamps, you know, they were destroyed. And then this fall in October. Well, October, they actually started releasing the new stamps. The new legends of the West Stamps. They actually weren't supposed to do it until December, but they went ahead and did it early. And even those stamps are selling like that. One of the first erroneous pains were one of those things. One of those 183 erroneous pains that got out. It's just 20 stamps now, so for $12,500. And now, if you've got hold of one of those erroneous stamps, it's because they released $150,000, but probably only worth $300.

Was it difficult for you to sell the idea to a publisher? It wouldn't have been accepted. I think this publisher was kind of little on the obligation to me. I had done a book for them before on Ross Perot, which died. When he pulled out of the race, so they said they were going to give me another shot. So this was kind of fulfilling that promise to him. I also understand that by the age of 30, when Piggy was in the prime of his cowboy life, he had a life-changing experience. A brother lost his sight for about a year? Yeah, nobody has been able to explain how that happened. He just woke up one day blind. And he wandered around like that for a year. And they just about adjusted to being blind for the rest of his life. And when just suddenly he regained his sight. And to nobody in the family can explain how that happened.

They tried all kinds of, they tried doctors and home remedies and folk medicine and everything. Nothing worked, but it just suddenly regained his sight. Did Piggy have a work on relationship with Tom Mix and Will Rogers? Oh, yeah. Tom Mix and, well, Rodgers, for example, was performing here with him in full work when he met Zach Miller. And he had worked with Will Rogers at the World's Fair in St. Louis the previous year. And they brought his visit to the home quite a bit because they were all there in Oklahoma. Tom Mix actually worked for the 101 Ranch. Zach Miller picked him up. He was a bartender or a tenderfoot. But he liked his looks. He had a look of cowboy. So, actually, Tom Mix picked up pretty good. And so he became a regular part of the show until he wound up going into movies. He also came in contact with Hoot Gibson and Buck Jones. All those people were confused.

At one time, and this is a kind of controversial thing. In one version, Piggy and Will Rogers were at Madison Square Garden. About to do his bulldog act on one of the steers got away. And they chased him into the stands and then the thing ran up into the balconies and scattering people. And Piggy jumped in with his horse and jumped off and grabbed the steel and held him while Rodgers wrote his heels and they dragged him back. Well, this is the thing that launched Will Rogers' career. But the newspaper story that came out excluded Piggy from it. All together. But in most accounts, you're reading these always magazines and things. They always have picket, including in that. But the thing that the newspaper story and New York paper plays up Will Rogers. Since the book has recently been released, has the reviews in which have been written thus far been favorable?

Well, it hasn't been none yet, because it's just out. It actually won't be in the bookstores until about another week. But I know of one that's coming in that I think is going to be favorable. I'm quite sure, as I stated before, all the information couldn't be included in this volume. Are there any plans or you have any ideas to subsequent? Yes, Frank wants me to team up with him and do a kind of a roots-like sequel to this. It would be more, it would be kind of faction, because he wants to get into things going on in the family at the time and things that happen to family members afterwards. So I hope we can give this word how we'll do this sequel. Are Cowboys here in the 20th century still using Bill Pickett's style of Bulldog? Only for exhibition purposes.

There's a guy named Timmy Brooks, who was doing that in a mini version of the Pawnee Bill show here during the summer at the Cowtown Coliseum. He's from around this area, he's a local cowboy. And in the Pickett rodeo, Louis Sontel's me, he has a guy doing by bite him down Pickett's style. But it's just for exhibition. Actually, Pickett didn't do it for competition, but he was mainly an exhibition that's not a competitor. Only in his later years that he really participated in straight bulldogging. In your opinion, why is it important for young Americans, not particularly African Americans, to understand the contribution that Black Cowboys made to the development and the working of the West? It's extremely important, because our role in the West was, do we just ridden out of it altogether? We were ridden out by the movies, by history and everything. Well, of course, everyone knows about the Buffalo soldiers now, but it's only recently that any attention was paid to them.

And in the Cowboys, there were a fifth to a quarter of them were Black, that went up all the Chisholm Trail and the Western Trail and all of that. And the cowboy way for them was really a cut above farming and other things. They had more freedom and all of this, there was more dignity in being a cowboy than there was in being working on farm or something like that. But it's a part of our history that we need to know. We made a tremendous contribution to the West and the West is the really image of American people all over the world most well. Does the Bill Pickett rodeo do well? I'm not sure. It survived for 11 years, and it has actually been the catalyst for the revival of interest in Bill Pickett. Have you had an opportunity to talk to Mr. Phillips once the book has been published and some of his ideas and comments on it?

Yeah, he loved it. He did. That's why he was proposing, hey, now we ought to do the sequel. Louis Sun said he nitpicked a few things, but he just told, hey, you're nitpicking. But he really is interested in doing something else on it. I mean, he was kind of skeptical, I think, when I first even approached him about doing it forward. But he likes it better than the other book that was out. How long did it take you to sit down and actually write the book? You said you got the idea 10 years ago, but actually it only took me about five months to write it. I'm quite sure this has been a labor of love in your life. Right, it has. But do you see other works coming out of Mr. Pickett becoming more researched and his contribution coming to the forefront more so than it has in the past? Well, what I view Pickett is doing is this is the door opener that's going to really trigger even more interest in other cowboys, other black cowboys.

That's what I view. Because he's a name people throw around. Almost everybody has heard Bill Pickett, but nobody knows anything about it. And so I did this and I think this is going to spur interest like another take. That was a story. If you have a minute, there's a name. George Glenn mean anything to you. George Glenn was a black cowboy who worked on a ranch in Texas. And his boss took, took a herd up to Abilene and his boss died up there. He got a heart attack. And they buried him, bombed him and buried him up there. Well, George, when they got back, George said, well, he wanted to be buried here. So nobody else would go with him. So George Glenn went all the way back up to Abilene in the wagon, hauled the body all the way down the back down to Texas and buried it, took him 42 days and got sick. And it was just a terrible adventure. That's not familiar to you. Yes, it does.

Exactly. That's where the idea came from. Okay. You see what we've been written out of the script and so many of us. Cecil Johnson, author of the new book entitled Guts, Legendary Black Cowboy Bill Pickett, published by the Summit Group. If you have a question or comment or suggestions asked the future in Black America programs, write us. Also let us know what radio station you heard us over. Views and opinions expressed on this program are not necessarily those of this station or the University of Texas at Austin. Until we have the opportunity again for IBA technical producer, David Alvarez. I'm John L. Hansen, Jr. Thank you for joining us this week. And please join us again next time. That's in Black America cassettes, Longhorn Radio Network, Communication Building B, UT Austin, Austin, Texas, 78712.

From the Center for Telecommunication Services, the University of Texas at Austin, this is the Longhorn Radio Network. I'm John L. Hansen, Jr. Join me this week on in Black America. Guts, Legendary Black Rollio Cowboy Bill Pickett with author Cecil Johnson this week on in Black America. Thank you.