The modern world record for steer wrestling, shared by four cowboys, is 2.4 seconds. It is the quickest of all rodeo events, a few blinks of the eye. It is a test of timing, brute strength, and fortitude, the last a quality that used to be called "grit."

A hundred years ago, a truly gritty Texan named Bill Pickett, billed as the "The Dusky Demon," is believed to have accidentally invented steer wrestling. At his best, he took an average of eight seconds to "bulldog" a steer to the ground but he had certain handicaps. There were no rope barriers that gave the steer a bit of a head start, no horseback "hazers" to keep the animal running in a straight line, and no really accurate timing mechanism. The only advantage Pickett had over the cowboy of today is that he brought his steer down using his muscles and his teeth.

The second of 13 children whose parents were descended from slaves, Bill Pickett was born in 1870 in Travis County, Texas, northwest of Austin. Like most boys from poor families in his era, Pickett quit school after the fifth grade and went to work-in his case, ranch work. He became a proficient cowboy while still a teenager.

In later years, he recalled seeing cowdogs with a strain of bulldog blood in them overcome runaway cattle by biting down on their snouts until they hit the ground. Family history records that, at age 16, he tried the "bulldogging" technique on a wild longhorn in the brush country he was working. He jumped off his horse onto the animal and, instead of the snout, bit down on the steer's lip until it surrendered.

In 1888, his family moved to Taylor, Texas, 30 miles northeast of Austin, and not long after settling there, Pickett is said to have "performed in the county fair." What he performed was not expressly reported, but the implication was that he demonstrated the bulldogging technique he had perfected two years earlier.

Yet another version of Pickett's first attempt at bulldogging is said to have occurred in 1903, in Rockdale, a cotton and coal-mine town in east Texas. The story goes that Pickett was working cattle into a corral when a nasty-tempered longhorn dug in, refused to budge, and thrashed around causing disruption amongst the whole herd. Pickett got angry, worked his horse alongside the steer and jumped on its back, wrestling it to the dirt by its horns and causing its final surrender by chomping down on its upper lip.

(Some question has been raised over the widespread belief that Pickett "invented" steer wrestling. In an 1892 gymkhana in Calgary, the event program listed a demonstration of steer wrestling made by one John Ware, a black Canadian cowboy. But Pickett, with his first bulldogging feat in about 1876 or 1877, is generally accepted as the "father" of the modern rodeo event.)

In the nearly 20 years he spent in Taylor, Pickett earned a living for his wife and nine children (he married a local girl, Maggie Turner, in 1890) as a steadily-employed cowhand, working in the horse breaking enterprise that was eventually named the Pickett Brothers Broncho Busters and Rough Riders Association, and giving bulldogging exhibitions at county fairs and rodeos. He was a lean, muscular cowboy, five-foot-seven tall, weighing 140 pounds, and in performing, favored bright shirts, batwing chaps, and big floppy sombreros.

In 1905, Pickett went to work for the fabled 101 Ranch, a tract of 110,000 acres of leased Indian lands founded in 1879 a few miles south of Ponca City, Okla. There, he became a star attraction in the 101's Wild West show, often billed as "The Dusky Demon" in an extravaganza that over the years featured performers such as Will Rogers, Tom Mix, Hoot Gibson, Ken Maynard, and "America's First Cowgirl," Lucille Mulhall. In his 1994 biography, Guts: Legendary Black Rodeo Cowboy, Bill Pickett, Cecil Johnson says that during 1912 alone, Pickett traveled more than 17,000 miles through 22 states, putting on more than 400 shows for the 101.

Pickett became a full-time employee of the 101 in 1907 and the next year moved his family to Oklahoma. He worked for the Miller Brothers, owners of the ranch, for nearly a quarter of a century, performing throughout the Western states and in Canada, England, Mexico, and Argentina.

Because of his race, he was often barred from competing with white cowboys, and so, to overcome this obstacle, he was often identified as a Comanche or other Indian.

Whether as cowhand or performer, Pickett was described by Zack Miller, one of the 101 owner's, "the greatest sweat-and-dirt cowhand that ever lived-bar none."

The Dusky Demon's fame spread when he became the first black film star in the first two all-black Western movies, these being a 1921 silent feature not surprisingly titled The Bull-Dogger, and a follow-up, The Crimson Skull, released a few months later. These were productions by Richard E. Norman, an itinerant film-maker who met Pickett in Boley, an all-black community in central Oklahoma, and shot the movies there. The only drawback in the movie-making was Norman's discovery that Pickett did not have the face of a matinee idol, and so Norman built the film around a pretty New York actress and dancer, Anita Bush, and let Pickett star in the rodeo events.

The Great Depression put an end to the 101-the Millers declared bankruptcy in 1931-and the next year Bill Pickett died after being kicked in the head while working horses. He lasted a day or two but breathed his last on April 2, 1932, and was buried on ranch property.

Among his posthumous honors, Pickett was inducted into the National Rodeo Hall of Fame in 1972 (the first black honoree), and in 1989, was named to the Prorodeo Hall of Fame and Museum of the American Cowboy at Colorado Springs, Colo. There is a bronze statue of Pickett at the Fort Worth Rodeo Grounds and the Bill Pickett Invitational, "The Nation's Only Touring Black Rodeo," is currently in its 21st year, "dedicated to all the Black cowboys and cowgirls of the past who helped shape the West and those of today who help to keep the spirit of the West alive."

In 1994, Bill Pickett appeared in the middle of a small dust-up when the U.S. Postal Service attempted to depict the old bulldogger on a postage stamp, one of a series honoring certain "Legends the West." The Pickett stamp bore a picture which many references identified as Bill Pickett but which was in fact a photo of his brother Ben. The Postal Service recalled the series to correct the error.

Of the hundreds of black cowboys in the post-Civil War West, many of them freed slaves or sons of slaves, only a few-as was the case with their Anglo and Mexican counterparts- made an individual mark on Western history. Among those few were:

* Bose Ikard, who cowboyed with Texas cattle barons Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving beginning in 1866. Goodnight said of him, "Bose Ikard...never shirked a duty or disobeyed an order, rode with me in many stampedes, and took part in three engagements with Comanches. Splendid behavior." Ikard died in 1929.

* Nat Love, known to dime novel writers as "Deadwood Dick," a Tennessean, born a slave in 1854, who cowboyed from the Texas Panhandle to Arizona and Dakota territories out of his home base, Dodge City, Kan. He claimed to have entered a rodeo as a sharpshooter at Deadwood, Dakota Territory, in 1876, and there earned the nickname "Deadwood Dick." He died in 1921.

* Ned Huddleston, born into slavery in Arkansas in 1849. As a young cowboy, he traveled to Texas and Mexico. For some years, he stole Mexican horses and swam them across the Rio Grande for sale in Texas and had many brushes with the law on both sides of the border. In law-abiding times, he took work as a horse breaker and all-round cowhand. He alternated between law-abiding and outlaw and was on the latter side, as a cattle rustler, when he was killed by bounty hunter Tom Horn in 1900.

Even among such notable men as these, Bill Pickett's name stands tall.