The Day Will Rogers Became The Cherokee Kid
- Matthew Kerns
- 14 minutes ago
- 5 min read
Will Rogers didn’t leave his home on Cherokee land in the Indian Territory to become a showman.
He left to be a cowboy.
In early 1902, Rogers and a friend dreamed making a fortune cowboying in South America. That’s where the plan began. The destination—and what came after—was something else entirely.
Will sold off his share of the family cattle business and began a journey that would take him further than he ever imagined. He traveled first to Hot Springs, Arkansas, then to New Orleans, where he boarded a steamship for New York City. From there, he sailed across the Atlantic to Southampton, England, then boarded a Royal Mail steamer bound back across the Atlantic to the south—stopping at Cape Verde, Rio de Janeiro, and Montevideo—before finally landing in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
The trip had taken two and a half months.
Nineteen days later, his friend was headed home. But Will Rogers stuck it out. He found work, stayed through the cold months, and eventually booked passage aboard a livestock ship bound for Durban, South Africa. In a letter home that September, he told his father he’d found work on a horse farm. By November, he was driving mules toward Ladysmith and looking for the next opportunity.
On December 5, 1902, Will Rogers walked into a field of canvas tents and smoke and spectacle.
It was the showgrounds of a Wild West show. They said the man that ran the show was from Texas, and Will thought he recognized the name.
He asked around and was pointed toward the show’s owner. Rogers introduced himself. He wanted to know if the man was really from Texas. He also wanted to know if there were any jobs with the show—wrangling horses or managing livestock.
The man asked what he could do.
“Bronco bustin’? Rope tricks?”
Will said he could rope a bit—better with a lasso than a bucking horse. The owner handed him a rope.
Years earlier, when Rogers was just thirteen or fourteen years old, he had traveled with his father from their ranch near Oologah, Indian Territory, to the bustling city of Chicago. It was the summer of 1893, and the city was in the midst of the World’s Columbian Exposition—a marvel of white buildings, electric lights, and wonders from around the globe.
But it wasn’t the Ferris wheel or the grand pavilions that caught Will’s attention. It was Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, camped just outside the fairgrounds.
Inside the arena, Rogers watched, wide-eyed, as Vicente Oropeza, a charro from Mexico and the finest trick roper in the world, spun his lasso in a blur of raw skill and showmanship. Will was hooked. He bought a copy of the show’s program and read it until the pages wore thin. When he got home, he picked up a rope and began to practice—over and over again—trying to mimic what he had seen.
So now, nearly a decade later, on a dusty showground in South Africa, Rogers stepped into the ring.
He began with a crinoline—a wide overhead whirl, the loop widening with each pass.
Before he could move on to the next trick, the owner cut him off and offered him a job.
The owner’s name was Texas Jack Junior—and when Rogers heard it, something clicked.
He remembered that name from the program he’d brought home from Buffalo Bill’s show in Chicago, the same booklet he’d worn ragged with rereading. The famous Texas Jack—Jack Omohundro—had been listed among Cody’s companions. Now, here in Ladysmith, was a man calling himself Texas Jack.
Rogers asked if this man was related to the Texas Jack that had been friends with Buffalo Bill.
Jack Jr. smiled and shook his head. He told Rogers the story—how Omohundro had rescued him from a Comanche camp when he was a child, and how he’d taken the name Texas Jack in honor of the man who gave him a future. He wasn’t born a cowboy, he said. But he had chosen to live as one. He had chosen to take up Texas Jack's mantle as a cowboy showman. And now, he was offering the same chance to Will.
Only later did Rogers find out what he’d missed. In a letter home, he recounted the moment with a mix of humor and frustration:
“I will tell you how I missed making $250… The owner does a trick with a rope (the big whirl where he lets out all his rope around him) and he has been offering 50 pounds, that is $250, for anyone that could do it. And he has been offering it for five years—outside America.
Well, I didn’t know anything of this 50 pounds. I just walked into the show that morning, done the trick, and he gave me a job. But now, since I belong to the show, I can’t get it.
Oh, but I was mad.”
Still, he stayed.
Will had left Oklahoma to make a living as a cowboy. But on the dusty showgrounds of a Wild West circus in South Africa, he found something else. In another letter home, he confided what he was beginning to want:
“I am going to learn things while I am with him that will enable me to make my living in the world without making it by day labor.”
And he did.
Texas Jack Jr. taught him how to work a crowd. How to build suspense and leave the audience wanting more. How to engage the crowd and shape his raw roping skills into a real act. And how to carry a stage persona with confidence and charm.
He gave Will a new job—and a new name: The Cherokee Kid.
It wasn’t never his plan. He never meant to leave home for the spotlight.
But Will Rogers didn’t just join a Wild West show that day. He unknowingly started down the path to becoming the man the world would one day know—the lasso-spinning, wisecracking, homespun voice of America.
The cowboy who took the stage became a star. Then a household name. Then something even rarer. By the 1930s, Will Rogers was the highest-paid movie star in Hollywood, the most popular radio personality in the country, and the most widely read syndicated newspaper columnist in America—all at the same time.
He made people laugh. He made them think. And more than almost anyone before or since, he made them trust him. He was one of the most revered, most beloved, and most uniquely American voices in this country’s history.
And it all began with a rope, a trick, and a job offer to a Cherokee boy from Oklahoma—on a dusty showground in Ladysmith, South Africa.
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