The Bull-Dogger was the first Western film produced by Norman Film Manufacturing Company. It featured Bill Pickett, a Black-Cherokee cowboy and actor who is credited with inventing bulldogging (biting the lip of a steer to wrestle it to the ground). The movie was filmed in and around Boley, Oklahoma, a thriving Black pioneer town incorporated in 1905 that was often advertised as a place where Black Americans could escape discrimination. While frequently represented as an expression of white manifest destiny, the Western United States (colloquially referred to as “The West”) also represented an opportunity for Black Americans to flee segregation laws present in the rest of the country in search of greater opportunities. Western films like this one therefore played an especially important role in Black representation on screen. The film largely comprised a series of action shots featuring Black cowboys. To further promote these exciting scenes, this three-sheet poster includes a depiction of one of the only surviving fragments of the film reel in which Bill Pickett wrestles a calf to the ground. Both the herald and the pressbook for the film emphasize the importance of race in the movie, stating that “this is the first feature picture of its kind, and proves conclusively that the Black cowboy is capable of doing anything the white cowboy does”—a powerful counterpoint to the dominant Hollywood narrative that mythologized the Western as an essentially white genre.