My recent attendance at a rodeo led me to consider the rodeo experience of a relative who was called “America’s Greatest Horsewoman.”

For four days in November, the 14th through the 17th, the sold-out, 4,800-seat Amarillo (Texas) Civic Center hosted the 29^th annual World Championship Ranch Rodeo of the Working Ranch Cowboy Association. My wife and I attended two of the sessions. We had learned of the event in July from a man who commented on my wife’s boots while we all waited for a plane in Charlottesville. He is a retired plastic surgeon from New York who supports the Association, which provides health benefits and academic scholarships to cowboys and cowgirls.

My wife and I have lived our lives, before and during marriage, in cities, although we’ve taken to watching the James Herriot series and shows like BBC’s “This Farming Life.” My wife and I had attended our first rodeo a couple years earlier in Gordonsville, Virginia. At that time, my Chicago hometown relatives were quite surprised, as were we, that Virginia had rodeos. Having had a good time in Gordonsville, we decided to travel to Amarillo and contribute to the philanthropy. We were not disappointed.

The opening ceremony celebrated patriotism and faith and family. There were many multigenerational families in attendance.

In came teams and their horses from 25 ranches in six states: Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. Each team had qualified for this rodeo by winning a sanctioned event. The printed program included two pages for each team, describing the ranch’s history, the number of thousands of acres, the number of horses or head of cattle, and biographical information and family pictures for each team member. There was also the 4^th annual Youth World Championship Ranch Rodeo with teams of five members each from 12 ranches.

The website of a different rodeo says it is the “only sport developed from working skills.” The four competitions were: bronc riding; stray gathering (four-person team roping two steers); team penning (four-person team cutting three calves bearing the same number from a herd); wild cow milking (two “muggers” holding a cow with help from a “roper” while the “milker” milks the cow and runs with the milk to a designated spot); and four-person team branding. (The Wall Street Journal ran a story on December 2 about the commercialization of rodeo; see Chelsey Dulaney, “Meet the Billionaires Taking Over Professional Bull Riding.” The sole event in these rodeos is bull riding. To me, such limited rodeos are like one trick ponies.) The first competition was rated with points for difficulty of the horse and skill of the rider. The others were timed events. In addition to winners for each event, the top two horses also received recognition. (For more, see Working Ranch Cowboy Association.)

I was surprised by three things about the rodeo. First, I could see how it was possible to lasso the head of a cow or steer. Yet, as many times as I saw the riders lasso the hind legs, I could not see how it was possible except by chance. The second surprise was the appearance of the men, both the riders and the attendees. None of the riders, all of whom seemed to be under age 30, and none of the attendees, who included older and younger men, had any visible body piercings or tattoos. They weren’t obese. Large numbers had facial hair, all trimmed, and no hair to the shoulders or waists like NFL players. These men all appeared to be strong, lean, and handsome — manly.

The third surprise was that there was only one horsewoman among the 100 riders. This was a surprise because a relative of mine, Lucille Mulhall (1885-1940), had broken that glass ceiling before 1900. She was inducted in the 1970s into the National Rodeo Hall of Fame in the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, Oklahoma City, and the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame, Fort Worth.

Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show had Annie Oakley, but Zach Mulhall’s Wild West Show had his daughter Lucille. (In 2012, the Oklahoma Senate unveiled a portrait of her as a personality from wild west shows.) As a teenager, Lucille could work a lariat, rope a steer, and race a horse better than the young men. She didn’t wear pants, but skirts. And she did not ride sidesaddle.

At only 14 she was invited to the second annual Rough Riders reunion rodeo in July 1900 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma (not yet the capital of the territory which was Guthrie). She won first place in front of 25,000 attendees, including New York governor Teddy Roosevelt, who marveled at her. Roosevelt urged Zach to take his daughter on tour so the country could see her skills. Zach did. Crowds saw her rope eight galloping horses.

Roosevelt saw her again in 1905 in Madison Square Garden. Now President, Roosevelt again exclaimed over her skills. He called her “The Golden Girl of the West.” She bears the titles “Queen of the Range,” “Queen of the Saddle,” “Queen of the Western Prairie,” “America’s Greatest Horsewoman,” and “Cowpuncher Queen of Oklahoma Territory.” By 1916, Mulhall was producing her own rodeo. Her “Mulhall’s Big Round-Up” offered competition and employment for other cowgirls, no longer a novelty.

There are five books about Lucille Mulhall: Americas First Cowgirl Lucille Mulhall (1957) by Beth Day; Lucille Mulhall: Her Family, Her Life, Her Times (1985) by Kathryn B. Stansbury; Lucille Mulhall Wild West Cowgirl (1992) by Lucille Stansbury; Lucille Mulhall: An Athlete of Her Time (2010) by Cynthia K. Rhodes; and a children’s book by Heather Lang and Suzanne Beaker: The Original Cowgirl: The Wild Adventures of Lucille Mulhall (2015).

When I purchased the last for a granddaughter who is taking horseback riding lessons, I discovered the authors had failed to include any actual pictures of our relative. Any online search, including old newspapers, will reveal many images, including most marvelously this 3-minute newsreel video from 1927. A still shot of her (not from the newsreel) riding a horse and working lariat is found at the following link: “Lucille Mulhall, Oklahoma Cowgirl & Wolf Roper,” Vickie McDonough, Petticoats and Pistols, Jan. 3, 2015. A full-page advertisement, with a picture of her, from the Oklahoma State Register in 1916, when she was 28, for the “89ers Celebration” in Guthrie is here: “Lucille Mulhall and the Mulhall Wild West Show,” Greg Hoots, Flint Hills Special Digital Magazine, Dec. 4, 2020. And here is the famous Will Rogers, a member of the Zach Mulhall Wild West Show, with Mulhall, in a publication after Zach’s death in 1931: “Will Rogers, Part II,” Oklahoma Today, Spring 1979, Reba Collins, p. 3. (The same picture appeared in the New York Times, April 9, 1905.) She is here in a very smart looking dress and hat: Topeka State Journal, Aug. 19, 1908, p. 9.

I looked online to learn the current status of women in rodeo and discovered that there are women-only rodeos, such as the Women’s Rodeo World Championship, and the Women’s Ranch Bronc Championships. I further learned that the Women’s Pro Rodeo Association (WPRA) is the oldest women’s-only sports organization in the country and celebrated 75 years in 2023. And this site gives a good history of women in rodeo. But let me quickly add that Mulhall did not compete in women-only rodeos since there were none. She competed against boys and men, and beat them — in Calgary, Fort Worth, Wichita Falls, Sheridan (Wyoming), Pendleton (Oregon), and many more places! For example, in Texas in 1904, at age 18, she “lassoed and tied three steers in three minutes and 36 seconds — several seconds better than the best cowboys — and won a gold medal and a $10,000 prize for a world record.”

There are few references which state that Lucille Mulhall was a Catholic. Her Catholic grandparents, Joseph and Susan Mulhall of St. Louis, were my great-great-grandparents. Lucille’s father, Zach, was Catholic. He attended the University of Notre Dame for a short time. After he moved from St. Louis to Oklahoma, Lucille went to a convent school in St. Louis. She then attended St. Mary’s College, the sister school of the University of Notre Dame, without graduating.

Lucille secretly married singer Martin Van Bergen in Brooklyn in a 1907 civil ceremony. He had joined Zack’s Wild West show two years earlier. Her father was not pleased because he was not Catholic. Martin converted and they married again in a Catholic ceremony in Kansas City in March 1909. The marriage fell apart because Martin wanted to settle down and she wanted to continue touring. He filed for divorce in March 1914 on grounds of abandonment. (He raised their son, Logan, who died in 1993.) In May 1919, Lucille married wealthy Texas cattleman Thomas Burnett. I do not know if they married in the Church. They were both strong-willed, separated a year later, and divorced in 1922.