| OCR Text |
Show Vkistorical mighlights Lf Clmo. Scott lllatlo. (Released by Western Newspaper Union.) The 'Original Cowgirl' WHEN an automobile accident resulted in the death of Lucille Mulhall near the town of Mulhall, Okla., recently, it snapped nr.ot'ier link with the Old West. For she was the "original cowgirl," the first of that tribe of daring young women who risk their necks riding bucking broncoes and roping steers or calves. But unlike many of the "synthetic "syn-thetic cowgirls" you see at the rodeos ro-deos or in circuses today, Lucille Mulhall was "authentic." She was the daughter of Col. Zach Mulhall, a pioneer of Oklahoma, whose ranch on Beaver creek once comprised more than 80,000 acres. While she was still a little girl her father offered to give her every yearling she could rope and brand by herself. But he soon begged off on his bargain when he noticed how many of his steers were wearing the brand of "L. M." When she was 14 she was the star attraction at the reunion of Roosevelt's Roose-velt's Rough Riders in Oklahoma City in 1900. There she matched her1 mmmw Lucille Mulhall In 1916. skill as a rider and roper against some of the best cowboys in the Southwest and held her own with them. Four years later at the cattlemen's cat-tlemen's convention in Fort Worth, Texas, she did even better when she entered the steer-roping contest. 'Queen of the Range.' Each contestant drew three steers by lot Miss Mulhall got two big tough ones at the start. She roped and tied the first one in 1 minute and 45 seconds. She cut that time down to 1 minute and 11 seconds with her second steer and she dropped her third one in the remarkable remark-able time of 40 seconds. Her total time for the three was 3 minutes min-utes and 36 seconds which was several sev-eral seconds faster than her nearest cowboy competitor. So they hailed the slight girl (she weighed less than 100 pounds) "Queen of the Range" and awarded her the championship gold medal valued at $1,000. Just to prove that her victory at t on worm was no nuKe, sne entered en-tered a steer-roping contest at Mc-Alester, Mc-Alester, Okla., in 1903 and roped and tied three steers in 30y, 40 and 40 seconds. From that time on Lucille Mulhall was the sensation of every . n.V.U l Zach Mulhall entered and her room in the Mulhall Mul-hall ranch house was filled with her trophies. She ,' was the star of the Wild West show which Colonel Colo-nel Mulhall organized or-ganized and took to the world's fair in St. Louis in 1904. When it chnupH in Mnrii- son Square Garden in New York city the next year, the Eastern papers pa-pers and magazines waxed lyrical over her and printed pages about the "Best Horsewoman in America." A 'Trail Boss." Another of her feats for which she became famous came about in this way: Colonel Mulhall had bought a herd of 700 steers down In the Texas Panhandle but was too busy to go down there and drive them back to his ranch. So Lucille Mulhall Mul-hall proposed that She and her sister, sis-ter, Mildred, take on the job. They took a few cowboys with them but Lucille was the "boss of the outfit" and under her direction the 700 steers were driven over the 300-mile 300-mile trail through bad weather without with-out suffering the loss of a single steer. When they buried her in the family fam-ily plot on the Mulhall ranch an old-timer was beard to remark: "Cowgirls and cowboys might live longer if they stuck to horses." Perhaps Per-haps he was thinking of the fact that Tom Mix, who had once worked en the Mulhall ranch, had been killed in an automobile accident in Arizona a few months earlier and that Will Rogers, who had also been a Mulhall ranch cowboy and a rider and roper in Colonel Zach's Wild j West show, had lost his life in an airplane accident in Alaska. |
