A stone’s throw away from the Will Rogers Memorial Center, home to the USTRC’s 2024 Cinch National Finals of Team Roping, is the National Cowgirl Museum & Hall of Fame, home to some of the handiest ropers in the history of the sport. Since before Oklahoma became a part of the Union, before the Great War, before the unsinkable Titanic sank in Arctic waters and before the Great Depression, women have been in the roping arena, and their historical feats are immortalized in the Cowgirl Museum.
LUCILLE MULHALL (1885-1940 - CLASS OF 1977
Lucille Mulhall was born on the family ranch near Guthrie, Oklahoma, plumb in the middle of the first rodeos in history popping up across the American West. Her father Zack was a roper and the producer of Mulhall’s Congress of Rough Riders and Ropers and raised Lucille to be worthy of the premier billing she received. By 1900, already having performed in front of crowds numbering in the thousands, Zack Mulhall bet $10,000 his 15-year-old daughter could out-rope the cowboys in El Paso, Texas.
Mulhall did just that, and it’s reported her brother had to save her from an angry cowboy mob who suddenly doubted her femininity, though she was that, too. She was well educated, an accomplished pianist and a famous Vaudeville performer and producer, but when Theodore Roosevelt was a guest at the Mulhall Ranch and shared an interest in wolves, it was also Mulhall who took her good horse to go catch a live one and kill it with her bare hands as a gift to the
