Bill Pickett
I owe my life to Bill Pickett, that historical mainstay of the Fort Worth Stockyards District. Generationally speaking, anyhow. Bear with me — won’t you? — and I’ll explain.
It was Pickett who taught a unique rodeo-wrangling technique to an early-day Black citizen of Amarillo, Jerry Calloway. Calloway brought a cowhand background to his citified life as a butler, an all-around handyman, and a protector of Black women on their long walks home from their day-job chores at the uptown hotels and restaurants of Amarillo.
And Jerry Calloway it was, in turn, who used that Pickett-style rodeo tactic to rescue my father-to-be from a runaway horse-drawn wagon. Kind of goes without saying that I might not exist had my father’s childhood predicament proved fatal. Like I said: generationally speaking.
John Andrew Price (1914-1985) was a captain of industry and a comparatively progressive thinker, given the place and the time: Dad staffed and operated his industrial-supply company with an eye for energetic salesmanship, more so than White-folks ruling-class perpetuation. His was an integrated workforce, in other words, branching from the Texas Plains to El Paso and into Eastern New Mexico.
And during the 1950s, Dad was among the few outspoken citizens who objected to a plan by the Amarillo Independent School District to dedicate a new school in the image of the Confederate States of America, complete with symbolic Battle Flag and a reactionary bellyaching nostalgia for such Deep Southern hallmarks as slavery, Klan lynchings, and the scent of magnolia, sweet and fresh.
“Most treasonous development in the history of the USA,” Dad would complain, “and that gol-blamed school board wants to brand in its honor a school where my kids’ll be going. If they’re going to name their campus after the outlaw town of Tascosa, in the first place, then why not name its mascot after Billy the Kid, that juvenile-delinquent punk, and let it go at that? Makes about as much sense, which is no sense at all.” (The concerted objection went unheeded, and Tascosa High School kept its pseudo-Confederate imagery until late in the 20th century, even into an age of decisive desegregation.)
My father’s social conscience stemmed from a fond and desperate memory of childhood: Dad often spoke with reverence of a Black man who “saved my life, yes, he did, once, when I was just a little ol’ sprout.” The story had to do with a runaway horse, harnessed to a buckboard in which the kid who was to become my father was a hapless passenger. The time was the late 1910s or perhaps 1920, when Dad would have been, indeed, “just a little ol’ sprout,” of age 5 or thereabouts.
Dad’s father, a Canyon-based dairyman named Absalom A. Price, had parked the wagon to make a delivery, leaving his son seated aboard. Something scared the horse — an automobile? maybe a dog? — and it bolted.
“I was all set to either crash or be thrown off,” as Dad recalled. “Looked like certain doom, y’know. But then, all of a sudden, this ol’ Black guy, he runs right up, just as fast as that horse is travelin’ — leaps onto its back — leans forward onto its neck — and sinks his teeth smack-dab into that horse’s lip!
“And that’s the one certain way to stop a horse — no pullin’ back on any reins, no ‘Whoa!’ about it. Just bite down on its lip and don’t let go! Brought that horse to a dead stop, he did. Saved my life, sure enough!”
And did my father recall the identity of this heroic “ol’ guy”?
“Yeah, well, he was a kind of a local-character figure here in Amarillo,” Dad said. “Well known around town, he was.”
Yes, okay — but his name?
“Never knew his right name,” Dad said. “Ever’body just called him by a nickname.” (A moniker that does not bear repeating in enlightened company.)
It turns out that the racially charged nickname — perhaps condescendingly affectionate, certainly dismissive — had been bestowed by white citizens. An Amarillo-based historian named Bruce G. Todd has solved that mystery in times more recent in a book called Bones Hooks: Pioneer Negro Cowboy.
Matthew “Bones” Hooks (1867–1951), an associate of the aforementioned Bill Pickett, was an entrepreneurial Black frontiersman who developed alliances with white folks in Amarillo early in the prior century. With these connections, Hooks would develop churches and schools and an entire neighborhood where Black residents could become property owners.
Bruce Todd’s book, in due course, reveals my father’s elusive rescuer as “one of the first Black residents of Amarillo since around 1895.” The figure emerges as “a big badass who escorted the Black women home to the Flats [in Northwest Amarillo] from their jobs at the hotels, carrying a bullwhip to deter the white boys who liked to bother the women. He was known to the Blacks as Brother Jerry Calloway.”
And finally: A name to flesh out my father’s reminiscence. The connections among Calloway, Bones Hooks, and Bill Pickett make it patent how Jerry Calloway knew to use the lip-biting ploy as a means of halting a horse. Pickett had invented the method, mimicking the chomping jowls of a cow-herding dog, and he taught it freely to any cowhand with gumption enough to try it.
There. Told you I’d explain, even if the telling would cost us a digression away from our central character, Bill Pickett. Anyhow, Pickett (1870-1932) was an African American and Cherokee-descended cowboy-turned-movie player whose career ranged from Jenks Branch, Texas (his birthplace), throughout the state, and into Oklahoma and points westward.
Pickett became a ranch hand at around age 10. His practical instincts led him to perfect the technique of bulldogging, the skill of leaping to seize a steer by the horns and wrestling it to the ground. Cattlemen would train bulldogs to subdue strays with a bite. Pickett reasoned that, if a bulldog could perform this feat, then so could he. To the tactic of springing from his horse and wrestling a steer, Pickett added the method of biting down on the lip and falling bass-ackwards. (Works on horses, too, but don’t try this at home.) His system became a crowd-pleasing rodeo showpiece.
In 1905, Pickett joined the 101 Ranch Wild West Show, billed as “the Dusky Demon,” and appeared alongside the likes of Buffalo Bill Cody and Will Rogers. The interstate rodeo circuit played up Pickett’s Native American tribal ethnicity. In 1921, he appeared in two Black-ensemble movies, “The Bull-Dogger” and “The Crimson Skull,” from the Florida- and Oklahoma-based Norman Film Manufacturing Co.
In 1932, having retired from the Wild West rodeo-circus scene, Pickett died from a head injury, caused by a kicking bronco. His grave lies near the White Eagle Monument, near Marland, Oklahoma. A similarly emphatic memorial, a statue depicting Pickett’s bulldogging maneuver, was sculpted in 1987 by Lisa Perry as a Historical Society installation in the Fort Worth Stockyards District. An additional statue arrived in 2017 at Taylor, Texas, which claims Pickett as a native son.
