Famed Roper Lucille Mulhall Paved the Way for Modern Day Roping in Early 1900s

March marks Women’s History Month and the sport of rodeo wouldn’t be what it is today without the women who helped pave the way. One legendary woman was Lucille Mulhall, as she became one of the first female ropers to enter the arena.

Lucille Mulhall in Rodeo

Born on her family’s ranch near Guthrie, Oklahoma all the way back in 1885, she was raised during a time when some of the rodeo events in history were popping up across the country. Her father Zack, was a roper and the producer of Mulhall’s Congress of Rough Riders and Ropers, so it was no surprise when she discovered that roping ran in her blood.

It was the cowboys who rode in to stay on her father's ranch that taught her the art of the lasso. Found in an article on Petticoats and Pistols, Lucille was just 10 years old when she began as a performer for men who came to her father's ranch. At 13, she started performing in front of thousands.

By the time she was 15 years old (1900), she had already been performing rope tricks in front of crowds that numbered in the thousands. Lucille’s skills were so impressive that her father placed a $10,000 bet ($387,204 today) that she could out-rope any of the cowboys down in Texas, according to an article in The Team Roping Journal.

Lucille went on to prove her father right as she ended up beating out the cowboys she was in competition with in El Paso and it’s even reported that her brother had to save her from an angry cowboy mob, who didn't believe she was female, after she had out-performed them.

Roping wasn’t her only skill, either. She has a strong education, played piano, and was a famous Vaudeville performer and producer. It's even noted that she was capable of roping up to eight horses at once, and she even did so at a horse show in Iowa.

The President's Champion

Most impressively, she caught the eye of Theodore Roosevelt who watched her perform at a Cowboy Tournament at a Rough Riders reunion. It was there that he then decided to come to dinner as a guest at the Mulhall Ranch. After expressing his interest in wolves, Lucille took her prized horse and tracked a pack all day, then she roped a wolf. Lucille killed and gifted the animal to the soon-to-be president.

Lucille was often billed as “the only lady roper in the world,” “champion lady steer roper” or “the world’s greatest woman roper,” and she won tens of thousands in prize money for feats like setting the world record in steer roping. In 1914, she became the Champion Roper of the World at the legendary Walla Walla Frontier Days in Washington.

Before her death in 1940 at 55 years old, she had competed all across the country and Europe, outperforming some of the best cowboys in the game at the time. She joined the Rodeo Hall of Fame in 1975 and the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame in 1977. It's rumored she made millions of dollars in the arena by the end of her career.

Lucille Mulhall was a member of the rodeo community before it even began to form in the ways we know it today. As it goes, she played a critical role in normalizing women in the sport and undoubtedly paved the way for women to continue to step in the rodeo arena as ropers.