Poster Willie M. "Bill" Pickett

Willie M. "Bill" Pickett (December 5, 1871 - April 2, 1932) was a cowboy and rodeo performer. Pickett's image on a handbill advertising the movie "The Bull-Dogger," released in 1921 by The Norman Film Manufacturing Company. Pickett was billed as "the world's colored champion" in "death-defying feats of courage and skill."Pickett was born in the Jenks-Branch community of Travis County, Texas. He was the second of 13 children born to Thomas Jefferson Pickett, a former slave, and Mary "Janie" Gilbert. The family's ancestry was black, white and Cherokee Native American. Pickett attended school through the fifth grade, after which he took up ranching work. He invented the technique of bulldogging, the skill of grabbing cattle by the horns and wrestling them to the ground. Pickett's method for bulldogging was biting a cow on the lip and then falling backwards. This method eventually lost popularity as the sport morphed into the steer wrestling that is practiced in rodeos today