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.

By the late 1880s, when the era of trail drives drew to an end thanks to barbed wire and railroad tracks, more than 5,000 African Americans had helped drive some 10 million cattle out of Texas. The open range was closed, but there were still plenty of ranches, some the size of small states, that needed good hands. For the men who worked them, breaking wild broncos and roping steers were part of the daily grind. Proficiency at these tasks came with irrefutable bragging rights, and competitions between rival outfits became a primary source of entertainment on the lonely prairie. At some point—perhaps 1883, if you believe the claim the West Texas town of Pecos makes on being the first—these impromptu contests were organized into what we now know as rodeo.

From rodeo’s inception, black cowboys were among the best to throw a lasso or buck out of a chute. At the turn of the century, one of the most famous rodeo cowboys in America was Bill Pickett, a black ranch hand from Taylor, outside of Austin. Pickett is credited with inventing steer wrestling, one of the seven events seen today at pro rodeos. Also known as bulldogging, this is a timed contest in which the cowboy chases down a steer on horseback, leaps off to catch it by the horns, and flips the animal onto its side, which stops the clock. The modern version lacks the theatrics that Pickett originally employed. The celebrated daredevil would sink his teeth into the steer’s lip, like a bulldog, and make the tackle with both hands in the air.

After one particularly egregious incident, Stahl protested the judge’s score by riding his next bronco backward with a suitcase in one hand.

Less well-known today is Pickett’s contemporary Jesse Stahl, a black bronc rider who became a legend after mastering a gut-twisting bronco named Glass Eye at the Salinas Wild West Show in 1912. Stahl, despite the fame he enjoyed from this feat, believed that some judges marked him unfairly because he was black. Rodeo insiders began to refer to him as “the cowboy who wins first but gets third.” After one particularly egregious incident, Stahl protested the judge’s score by riding his next bronco backward with a suitcase in one hand.

This kind of discrimination intensified throughout the 1920s as new Jim Crow laws were passed across the country. Although the Rodeo Cowboys Association had been formed in 1936 to ensure that top contestants could earn a living wage competing on the national circuit year-round, its benefits did not extend to the black cowboy. (The group originally called itself the Cowboys’ Turtle Association because the founders were slow to organize, and it “had stuck its neck out to get started.” The RCA moniker was adopted in 1945, and today it is known as the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association.) The RCA never explicitly barred African Americans from competing, but some stock contractors refused to let a black cowboy rope or ride their animals. This, along with discriminatory laws and the surge of the KKK in the first half of the twentieth century, which made traveling in parts of the South even more dangerous than riding bulls, effectively prevented black contestants from joining the pro rodeo circuit.

In response, “soul circuits” began to crop up along the Gulf Coast of Texas. These rodeos and other “hat rides” (audience members put money in a hat that was passed around) didn’t offer a big payout, but they provided African Americans an opportunity to compete. From this loose network emerged the Southwestern Colored Cowboys Association, one of the earliest minority rodeo organizations, which fostered some of the greatest talent in the sport’s history. Among these riders were Marvel Rogers, who puffed on Cuban cigars while busting broncs, and Willie Thomas, a talented bull rider who was inducted into the National Multicultural Western Heritage Museum and Hall of Fame. And, of course, there’s Thomas’s protégé: Myrtis Dightman.

Photograph by LeAnn Mueller

Dightman took to cowboying at a young age. He was born in 1935, a few miles outside of Crockett, on a ranch owned by Karl Leediker, a white man whose family immigrated from Prussia. Dightman’s father, Odie, worked as a hand on the four-thousand-acre spread, one of the largest commercial ranches in Houston County. His mother, Ada Lee Polk, picked cotton and peas and cared for the family’s home. The house didn’t have electricity, so Dightman and his four siblings ate their dinner—cabbage greens, pinto beans, and sweet potatoes—by the light of a coal oil lamp.

When Dightman was ten years old, he was feeding, branding, and tending herds across the sprawling property. He quit school in seventh grade to work the ranch full-time, spending days on horseback driving several hundred head of cattle down dirt roads to the nearest railroad station.

By the time he turned eighteen, though, Dightman had had enough of working another man’s stock and moved to Houston, where he had kinfolk. There he picked up various odd jobs, but even in the city, Dightman remained a cowboy at heart. He started attending small rodeos held around Houston and soon realized that many of them were missing something. “A lot of times they didn’t have no rodeo clown,” Dightman remembered. “I said, ‘Shit, I can do that.’ ”

The job of a rodeo clown, or bullfighter, is to keep the bull from doing serious bodily harm to the cowboy after he’s bucked off. It turned out that Dightman, sure-footed and confident in the arena, was damn good at it. Soon he was working regional rodeos just about every weekend.

Courtesy of Myrtis Dightman

As a young bullfighter, Dightman befriended a bull rider named James Francies Jr., who had also been a ranch hand and had found work in the city as a lineman for Houston Lighting & Power. On their way to a rodeo one weekend, they got to talking about the upcoming Houston Fat Stock Show. Not a single trail rider scheduled to participate in the rodeo’s kickoff parade was black. They decided to change that. Dightman and Francies turned to Prairie View A&M, the historically black college known for its agriculture program, for help. In 1957, along with Alfred Poindexter, a veterinary professor, they founded the Prairie View Trail Riders Association, the first black organization of its kind in Texas and possibly the United States. That year, Dightman, Francies, and several others rode during the parade, though officials held them several blocks behind the rest of the procession. No matter. Their numbers grew the following year.

Eventually Dightman’s abilities as a bullfighter took him well beyond state lines to bigger rodeos with beefier paychecks. But he rarely saw African Americans competing. “Where are the black cowboys in pro rodeo?” he wondered. Although he turned 25 in 1960, middle-aged for pro rodeo, Dightman decided to try his hand at riding the “rough stock.” He asked several of the black cowboys he’d met while working the rodeos, including Willie Thomas, to show him the ropes. After years of preventing bulls from trampling others, he started climbing on top of them himself. “The first few bulls threw me off pretty good,” Dightman recalled. “But that didn’t last long.”

In the spring of 1960 a couple of friends paid Dightman’s entry fee so that he could compete in his first rodeo. Sure enough, he finished in the money. That was all the motivation he needed. By July he was fighting and riding bulls at competitions across the state—and excelling at both. After a rodeo in Baird, the Abilene Reporter-News remarked that Dightman “rode the bull, got off its back, took off his boots and chaps, and commenced to do a little bullfighting. When he finally left the arena, there was no doubt remaining about his talents.”

Francies began urging his friend to go pro, but Dightman hesitated. The $50 initiation fee was steep, and he was married with three young children by then. One afternoon in 1961, Francies called: “Come on by, Myrtis. I’ve got something for you.” When Dightman arrived, Francies handed him a pro card. “The best investment I ever made,” Francies later told Sports Illustrated.

Dightman spent the next few years working on his craft but didn’t commit to rodeoing full-time. Like many black cowboys at the time, Dightman wasn’t offered sponsorships, so he found it necessary to keep a day job—he drove big rigs across the state. Finally, in 1964, he decided “to see what I could do if I really tried.” He crisscrossed the country, entering every rodeo his Chevy could make it to by showtime. It was a lonely existence. While the white riders booked into hotels with their families, Dightman would often pull over and sleep in the back seat of his car—but first he would talk with a local police officer and explain that he was just passing through. He found camaraderie with the other bull riders, but he was never sure how a new audience might respond to him. There were plenty of times when he was forced to ride after the main event had ended, in what’s called the slack. “It didn’t make no difference to me,” he says now. “I don’t care when you’re gonna let me ride. I was going to win some money.”

As the 1964 season wound down, Dightman was the seventeenth ranked bull rider in the world, two spots short of an invitation to the NFR. But in the last few contests, two higher-ranked cowboys got so busted up that both men were unable to ride in December. Incredibly, Dightman was headed to the National Finals, making him the first African American to compete at the World Series of rodeo. When Dightman showed up for the event, he was unusually anxious. This was the biggest stage of rodeo, after all. He managed to tie for second place in the first go-round, but only made one other qualified ride over the next seven nights. His first trip to the NFR added a paltry $245 to his year-end total, leaving him right where he was when the rodeo started: a disappointing seventeenth overall.

And although he had shattered a barrier in the sport, the year on the road had been tough on him and his family. When his wife, Fannie Mae, was in labor with their fifth and final child, that August, Dightman was 1,500 miles away, at a rodeo in Billings, Montana. He walked away with the first-prize buckle but missed the birth of his son. Dightman decided to step away from rodeo and went back to driving eighteen-wheelers.

The career change afforded him more time at home, but he hated working for someone else. In rodeo, the rules were simple: “The bull wants to be the boss, and it’s up to you to prove that he ain’t.” Dightman had tasted the freedom and thrill of the cowboy’s life; rodeo had settled in his blood. There was no going back.

He returned to bull riding in 1966, this time more focused than before—no more bullfighting. He would concentrate solely on winning money punching an eight-second timecard. He placed third at Cheyenne, in front of 15,000 fans, and he was recognized as the first black contestant to ride in Houston’s Astrodome, where he placed first in the opening go-round. By the end of the season Dightman was ranked eighth nationally, and he earned enough points at the NFR to hold on to that position, his best finish yet.

Dightman had proven to detractors that black cowboys could ride with the best in rodeo. Yet still he sought a higher goal: he wanted to be the world champion, and 1967 was the year he was going to do it.

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

For rodeo devotees, the 1967 season was one for the ages. All year, Dightman was locked in a fierce fight with two of the best riders on the circuit. Bill Stanton, 26 years old and a near ringer for Hank Williams Sr., had shot to the top of the standings in early March after besting 83 other challengers to win an event in Houston. Less than two weeks later, Stanton edged out Dightman by three points to win the Sheriff’s Rodeo in San Bernardino, California. The Washington cowboy was off to the best start of his career, but hot on his wedged heels was Larry Mahan.

At 23, the future Hall of Famer was already making his mark on rodeo. Mahan wore psychedelic chaps and kept his hair long, behavior that would’ve gotten most laughed out of the arena. But no one could knock Mahan’s ability. In addition to being a skilled bull rider, he was a top hand in the bareback and saddle bronc events. The year before, he had brought home $40,358, nearly matching the record for most money earned in a single season and he won his first All-Around Cowboy title, an award given to the contestant who competes in two or more events and earns the most overall money. By April 1967 he was already on pace to smash the single season record.

Though Stanton had jumped out to an early lead, Dightman’s first-place finish at the rodeo in Edmonton, Canada, had boosted his total earnings to $7,651, knocking Stanton from the top of the rankings by just $2. Such razor-thin margins provided excellent fodder for the papers, which hyped their “neck-and-neck battle” to lure bigger crowds to local rodeos. In Vernon, west of Wichita Falls, Dightman and Stanton drew the same bull, a powerful beast named B-16. The showdown ended in a draw: B-16 shucked both riders before the buzzer sounded.

Most of the time, though, it was Dightman who got the better of his bovine adversary. At the Rose Bowl, he went head-to-head with Dreamboat, “one of the orneriest Brahmas on the rodeo circuit,” according to the Independent Star-News in Pasadena. Dightman rode him to the buzzer and the grand-prize buckle. At a rodeo in Fort Smith, Arkansas, one admiring cowpoke said to a reporter, “I’d turn black or green if I could ride those devils like he does.”

Across the country, meanwhile, racial tensions were at a fever pitch. That summer, riots left scores of African Americans dead in Detroit, Newark, Tampa, and elsewhere. In Houston, 488 students were arrested after a protest at Texas Southern University, a historically black college. Muhammad Ali was promptly stripped of his heavyweight title after refusing an order to fight in Vietnam, and a few weeks later he held a press conference to explain his objections to the draft. “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong,” he famously said. Several of the era’s most well-known African American athletes sat beside him in solidarity. The Ali Summit, as it has since become known, was a transformational moment in America, when black athletes entered the public consciousness as figures of social change.

In most ways, Dightman was nothing like Ali. He was humble and even-tempered, and he possessed the reticence of a man accustomed to being alone. A cowboy’s sensibilities. He let his riding do the talking. And yet the two men shared a relentless competitive streak. “I don’t have time to fool around,” Dightman told a reporter that summer. “I want to see a colored man [win].” As rodeo’s only black cowboy, the pressure was on him to do it.

Behind the chutes, the discussion often turned to whatever feat Dightman had managed the week before, whether it was dogging a steer for kicks or turning in yet another classic ride.

All three of the top riders remained hot, but the threat of injury was constant. At a rodeo in Redding, California, Dightman was kicked in the chest and flew some twenty feet across the arena. “Everybody thought I was hurt real bad,” he told Newsweek, “but I hardly felt it.” Mahan wasn’t so lucky. During the frenzy of July Fourth rodeos known as “Cowboy Christmas,” a bull broke his instep. The reigning all-around champ was sidelined while Dightman and Stanton forged ahead.

Though there were bigots who’d show up to hurl insults at Dightman, the majority of the fans just wanted to see a good ride, and that was something he was able to deliver night after night. The quiet cowboy from Crockett was acquiring a following. His fellow cowboys were also impressed. Behind the chutes, the discussion often turned to whatever feat Dightman had managed the week before, whether it was dogging a steer for kicks or turning in yet another classic ride.

No bull rider thought more highly of Dightman than Warren “Freckles” Brown. The Oklahoma cowboy and Dightman occasionally traveled together. They made quite the pair: the only black cowboy in pro rodeo barreling down the highway with the oldest bull rider on the circuit. One writer described Brown as “the most implausible athlete in creation, a smiley little chipmunk going on 47 in a kid’s game.” By 1967 Brown had won a world championship, fought in World War II, and broken his neck riding bulls. He had so many pins and screws holding him together that he called himself “a walking hardware store.” To Dightman, though, he was the Unsinkable Mr. Brown and the closest thing he had to a brother in the world of pro rodeo. Just like the cowpokes of the Old West, they rode, ate, and bunked together—and both men dreamed of cinching their Wranglers with the ’67 gold buckle.

Dightman was getting closer to realizing that dream. Though he had slipped back to second a couple of weekends after Edmonton, he was raking in cash everywhere he went. But a few weeks after his July injury, Mahan returned to action with a specially rebuilt boot and a vengeance for every critter he drew. In September he boosted his total earnings by winning the Pendleton Round-Up in front of a home-state Oregon crowd. The reigning all-around champion proved to be unstoppable, and not only because he was one of the best to ever strap on spurs. He and Stanton held another advantage—they each owned a private plane. While Dightman hit the road in his Chevy, Mahan and Stanton zipped across the skies, which allowed them to hit more rodeos with more time to rest in between. Before the regular season ended, Mahan overtook the lead from Stanton, pushing Dightman down to third.

Still, there was a lot of money to be won at the National Finals Rodeo in Oklahoma City. Plus, Dightman had a bit of extra encouragement: his wife, Fannie, and their oldest son, Myrtis Jr., would be in the stands cheering him on.

On the first evening of the finals, both Dightman and Brown drew unrideable bulls. Dightman would face Playmate, a white and tan Brahman with horns curved like the prongs of a pitchfork. Brown would take on Tornado, a malevolent beast that had bucked off more than two hundred cowboys without a single qualified ride. The odds didn’t look good for either of them. But Dightman was on a mission—he’d try this one the same as he’d try any other. Playmate came rumbling out of the chute, kicking up clouds of dust as he tried to throw his would-be conqueror, but when the buzzer sounded, Dightman was still hanging on. Even so, the judges scored him low. On the last ride of the night, meanwhile, Brown ascended into rodeo mythology by becoming the first to conquer Tornado (he finished fifth overall). Even Dightman couldn’t believe it: the Unsinkable Mr. Brown had done it again.

Over the next six go-rounds, Dightman never managed a top score. He finally placed third in the eighth go-round, but the championship had all but slipped away. Still, Dightman refused to go gently. On the final night, he clambered over the chute and onto Batman, a black brute that had yet to be mastered at the NFR. The gate swung open, and the bull leaped out, leaving ropes of slobber in his wake. Junior looked on from the stands as his father’s left foot spurred in tandem with the bull’s every movement. Fannie shielded her eyes. Finally, the buzzer went off. Dightman made a clean dismount. It was a good ride, good enough to win the go-round, but when the money was tallied, Dightman’s $16,014 fell short.

He had thrown everything he had at the title but was only able to manage third. Dejected, he turned to Brown. “Freckles, what do I have to do to win the world championship?” he asked.

“Myrtis,” Brown replied, “you keep riding like you do. And turn white.”

