JULY 2018

The Jackie Robinson of Rodeo

Five decades ago, Myrtis Dightman broke the color barrier in professional rodeo and became one of the best bull riders who ever lived. But his imprint on the sport was only just beginning.

BY CHRISTIAN WALLACE
ISSUE JULY 2018

Eight seconds were all Myrtis Dightman needed to make history. ... It was 1967, the first weekend in April, and the lean 31-year-old cowboy lowered himself onto the back of a 1,700-pound bull. He was at a rodeo in Edmonton, in the Canadian province of Alberta, the farthest he’d ever been from his East Texas hometown of Crockett. The air was thick with the stench of livestock and cigarette smoke as five thousand onlookers packed the concrete grandstands.

Dightman, dressed in a starched collared shirt and tan chaps with three dark leather diamonds running down the sides, slid his legs around the flesh-and-blood powder keg, careful to keep his spurs turned out. He slipped his right hand into the braided hold behind the Brahman’s muscular hump. Red dust billowed from the bull’s hide as the grass rope—the only thing Dightman was allowed to hold on to—was pulled tight as a hangman’s halter around the animal’s midsection. His hand now strapped in the rigging, Dightman leaned forward until he was nearly looking down between the bull’s horns. He closed his left hand into a fist as he raised it high above his cream-colored cowboy hat. ... To make a qualified ride, a cowboy has to hang on for eight seconds without his free hand touching himself or the bull. If he “makes eight,” judges will give the ride a score, with a total of a hundred possible points—fifty for how hard the bull bucked and fifty for the rider’s ability to stay in control. If Dightman held on, this ride could send him to the top of the standings. He took a breath, then nodded. The chute flung open.

1, 2, 3, 4 . . .

{snip}



Dightman at the 1966 National Finals Rodeo, in Oklahoma City.

Devere Helfrich/Dickinson Research Center/National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum

....
Unlike the baseball player he’s so often compared to, Dightman was not the first African American to compete in the major league of his sport. The history of rodeo runs deep, back to the golden age of cowboys, the two decades following the Civil War, when trail bosses such as Oliver Loving and Charles Goodnight drove huge herds on long, epic journeys to meat-hungry markets up north. According to the countless dime-store novels and shoot-’em-ups inspired by this blip in American history, the Old West was tamed entirely by white buckaroos who looked like Gene Autry and John Wayne. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, historians such as Kenneth W. Porter, a well-respected scholar of the American West, have estimated that one in four cowboys was black. It varied from one outfit to another, but a typical group of eleven cowpokes pushing beef down those dusty trails might have included seven white men, three black men, and one Hispanic or Native American man. Though black cowboys often shouldered the least-desired chores and were rarely promoted to foremen, Porter said that cowboying may have been the least discriminatory industry at the time. These multicultural crews sweated, swore, and bunked down together at the end of every hard-ridden day. When they arrived in Dodge City, Kansas, or whatever railroad hub marked the end of their journey, the cowboys mostly received equal pay—and many of the saloons and gambling houses were glad to lighten their pocketbooks all the same.