The EconomistJanuary 27th 2018 United States 312A
PART from the Missy Elliot and Ludacris
songs that blare through the speakers
in lieu of country tunes, the Bill Pickett In-
vitational sounds and looks like a typical
rodeo. In the dirt arena cowboys and cow-
girls cling to bucking broncos. They rope
calves and weave in and out of barrels. The
stands are packed with fans decked out in
cowboyhats and boots who nibble at bar-
becued chicken and gasp when riders are
thrown to the ground. At half-time there is
“mutton busting”, an event in which small
children are plonked onto the backs of
sheep and ordered to hang on as their
fuzzy mounts dartaround the ring. The big-
gest difference is that all the contestants—
and most of the audience—are black.
The Bill Pickett Invitational, which per-
formed in Denver on Martin Luther King
Day and will visit five other places this
year, is America’s only touring black rodeo.
It was founded in 1984 by Lu Vason, a mu-
sic-industry promoter, after he attended a
rodeo in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and “didn’t
see a single rider who looked like him”, re-
calls Valeria Vason-Cunningham, who has
run the rodeo since her husband’s death in- Vason decided to name the rodeo
after Bill Pickett. Born in 1870 in Texas, Pick-
ett was the son of a freed slave who invent-
ed the sport of steer wrestling, or “bulldog-
ging”. Pickett would gallop after a cow on
his horse, spring off, draw the cow’s face
into his own face by its horns, and latch his
teeth into its lip as he had seen herder dogs
do. The bite would confuse the steer, al-
lowing Pickett to pull it over with just his
jaw, his hands held skyward.
Pickett went on to perform with the
likes of Buffalo Bill and Will Rogers under
the stage-name of“The Dusky Deamon”;
he was the first black man ever admitted
into the ProRodeo Hall of Fame. But where-
as Pickett’s talent was rare, blackcowboys
during his era were not. They were funda-
mental to the settling of the West, both as
slaves and freedmen. In the first half of the
19th century, white Americans in search of
cheap land flocked to Texas, which was
then Spanish and, after 1821, a Mexican ter-
ritory. Some brought slaves with them to
work their newly established cotton farms
and cattle ranches. After slavery was abol-
ished, ranchers hired their former slaves as
paid workers.
Black people from the east also flockedwest, keen to cash in on the booming
ranching industry. “Ranching work was
challenging, manly and allowed black
people to make as much as whites. It al-
lowed them to do something that gave
their families some measure of equality,”
says William Loren Katz, author of “The
Black West” and 40 other books on Afri-
can-American history. Historians estimate
that of the 35,000 cowboys who ranged
the West between 1866 and 1895, at the
height of the cattle industry, between
5,000 and 9,000 were black.
During the Jim Crow era blacks were
shut out of mostrodeos. The cowboys in
the novels and films that familiarised the
rest of America with the West were almost
always white. Without venuesto compete
in or stars to inspire young blackcowboys,
the tradition eroded. As Ms Vason-Cun-
ningham waits for the Bill Pickett rodeo to
begin, she estimates that fewer than 5% of
cowboys in the Professional Rodeo Cow-
boys Association, the country’s largest ro-
deo organisation, are black. The organisa-
tion says it does not track the ethnicities of
its riders, though it does ask about their fa-
vourite food: “I can tell you that for 99% of
them it’s steak.”
Appropriately, the first event of the
night in Denver is steer wrestling. Before
entering the arena, Tory Johnson, a 32-
year-old from Oklahoma City, secures his
cowboyhat, shifts his weight from side to
side in his stirrups and tightens his grip on
the reins. He takes a deep breath and gives
a subtle nod. The gates spring open. On a
golden Palomino with a flowing mane and
thick white blaze, Mr Johnson explodes
forward into the dirt arena in pursuit of a
steer that has been released in front of him.
He tips off his mount until his arms are
locked around the steer’s neck; then he
kicks both feet out of his stirrups, leans into
the steer and wrestles it to the ground—
with no use of teeth, it should be noted.
The whole ordeal takes 5.6 seconds. 7Race and horsesRodeo drive
DENVER
The Bill Pickett rodeo aims to restore blackAmericans to the saddleYee-hawanother 900 shops this year. Yet rural com-
munities account for only 46m, or 15%, of
the population—and they are shrinking
fast. Many small towns have only 75% of
the population they had 25 yearsago. In 33
counties in Illinois, the population peaked
over a century ago, says Mr Merrett. To
keep expanding so rapidly, Dollar General
will need to appeal to those with a higher
income than the working poor. It has al-
ready made inroads into more affluent
groups. According to Nielsen, a marketing
researcher, 43% of customers with house-
hold income of $29,000 or less but also 23%
of those earning more than $70,000 said
they shopped at a dollar store in 2016. The
new shop in Lewisburg is on Yell Road,
which is lined with pretty houses and biggardens; the cars parked in front of the
shop are mostly gleamingSUVs and big
pickup trucks. The “market” outlet offers
fresh shrimp, Chobani yogurts and other
fancy foodstuffs.
Walmart’s rapid rise caused resentment
in rural communities as it killed smaller lo-
cal shops and was said to treat its workers
poorly. Dollar General, however, ventures
into places where the last grocery shop of-
ten closed years ago, which is why its re-
ception by locals tends to be much friendli-
er. The same is likely to be true as Dollar
General expands into troubled urban
neighbourhoods such as Chicago’s South
Side, where rents are cheap. In these so-
called food deserts, an investment by any
retailer is good news. 7РЕЛИЗ
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