Inglewood locals got to learn about the roots of Black cowboys and cowgirls on Friday.

The Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo has hit the road with its inaugural traveling museum and made its latest stop on Friday at Inglewood’s Edward Vincent Jr. Park. The visit to Inglewood honored the rodeo’s founder, Lu Vason, who died in 2015, and celebrated the 38th anniversary of “the greatest show on dirt.”

The museum visit to Inglewood only lasted a day, but the rodeo will also put on actual shows in the City of Industry this weekend.

The truck trailer museum houses memorabilia — some from Vason’s collection — from the 1980s to 2021. Each glass case is dedicated to a different era, filled with belt buckles, saddles, jackets and jeans, tickets and programs from 1987 shows, and even souvenirs from past shows, such as cookie tins and hot sauce bottles.

Its walls are lined with photos of nearly 1,000 cowboys and cowgirls that have ridden in the rodeo since its 1984 inception.

It was the museum’s third stop around the nation, said Jody Gilbert, art director, web developer and office coordinator for the rodeo.

The moving history lesson started in Fort Worth, Texas in May — with another show there on Juneteenth — and then went to Oakland last weekend, Gilbert said by phone Thursday. After Los Angeles, the museum will visit Atlanta, Fort Worth once more in August, and end in Washington, D.C. in September, where the rodeo finals will take place, he added.

The museum also highlights other Black western pioneers like Mary “Stagecoach Mary” Fields, the first Black woman to become a star route mail carrier in the U.S., known for toting and quick-shooting two guns to protect her cargo; Bass Reeves, the first Black deputy U.S. marshall west of the Mississippi River, who touted more than 3,000 arrests and became a police officer in Oklahoma when it first became a state; and Nate Love, a cowboy with a special talent for breaking horses or training them to be ridden.

Inglewood Councilmen George Dotson of District 1 and Councilman Alex Padilla of District 2 sponsored free hot dogs, popcorn and drinks, a bounce house and games for children at Friday’s event, as well as a DJ playing oldies from artists like Smokey Robinson.

A couple of Black-owned food trucks, including Mr. Fries Man, pulled up to sell goodies too. There was a raffle to win tickets for this weekend’s sold out rodeo shows in the City of Industry, pony rides for children, line dancing and a performance by Roc’co Tha Clown later in the day.

Margo Wade-Ladrew, the rodeo’s national development, sponsorship and California rodeo coordinator, helped bring the museum to Inglewood for its only California stop in its first year, said District 1 liaison Gwen Goodman. Wade-Ladrew owns a business in the city and wanted to show love for Inglewood.

The Bill Pickett Invitational set a precedent for the Black rodeo experience, according to an informational video at the museum. In creating the first Black traveling rodeo, Vason envisioned that it would be a vehicle to enhance the Black community, as well as dispel the myth that Black cowboys and cowgirls didn’t exist, per the video, as Black people’s contributions to the early West had been largely erased from history.

Free Black people went West after the Civil War for better opportunities and were a huge part of the early settlements, including doing ranch work.

Vason noticed a lack of Black riders at a Cheyenne Frontier Days rodeo in Wyoming. Then, in 1984 in Colorado, he created the all-Black traveling showcase, the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo, named after the most famous Black rodeo performer of all time.

“I thought it was an injustice that we didn’t have any Black cowboys” in that show, Vason said in a video in the museum. “So I decided to eliminate the myth by forming a Black rodeo company.”

Bill Pickett (1870-1932) was the first Black cowboy to star in western films, specifically 1921’s “The Bull Dogger” and “The Crimson Skull,” and he invented “bull dogging,” a way to control steers now known as “steer wrestling” in the worldwide rodeo industry. His performance at the 1904 Cheyenne Frontier Days earned him a job at the Miller Brothers 101 Ranch in Oklahoma, where his “bull dogging” method become a rodeo staple.

Pickett died after an 11-day coma from being kicked in the head by a wild bronc.

After Vason died, his then-wife Valeria Howard-Cunningham took the reinns in 2017, becoming the first Black woman to lead a touring rodeo organization. Last year, she created a partnership with the Professional Bull Riders organization and held a showdown event on Juneteenth 2021, the first time a Black rodeo was nationally televised.

“It’s a whole new era of Black women in rodeo,” Gilbert said, as Howard-Cunningham hired many other women for her managerial team.

Dotson, for his part, said that it’s “amazing” to have an event like this in Inglewood.

“A lot of us never knew and never would know,” that Black people are cowboy pioneers, Dotson said. “For me, it’s a dream come true because I wanted to be a cowboy, until I learned how much work it is.”

His wife, Ida Dotson, echoed that Black history such as this needs to be taught more prominently.

“I wish more of our kids could know where they come from and what happened in their parents’ and grandparents’ lifetimes,” she said, “so they know how they came to be today.”

The rodeo has landed in 23 states and 32 cities around the country, and has a Bill Pickett Rodeo Foundation that provides scholarships so students can experience rodeo while learning Black cowboy and cowgirl history — and their impact on the American West.