When most of think of a cowboy, we tend to think of slick-talking, sharpshooting white man with cowboy hat and leather boots. In the U.S., it’s a tall task to grow up without seeing at least one western film or tv show with this archetype. But the term “cowboy” was what Black cattle ranchers, usually slaves or former slaves, were called.
The stories of Black cowboys are often left untold in American history and pop culture. Descendants of these ranchers want to combat this oversight, and set the record straight in an effort to include the contributions of these men in history and culture of the American West. But to truly dig into the past of the Black cowboy, means unearthing a complicated history.
Alaina Roberts, an assistant professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh and author of “I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land,” wrestles with the tension between the historical and popular culture depiction of Black cowboys. Her work uses archival research to connect “debates about Black freedom and Native American citizenship, to westward expansion on Native land.” She says that Black cowboys, who did various categories of work, were also a part of settling the West and its territories into the United States.
“You have people like the Buffalo soldiers, who are a part of the U.S. Army; U.S. marshals like Bass Reeves,” Roberts said. “And then you have Black men riding for a living to take care of their family.”
Many of the Black people in the West were brought to the land by white settlers decades before the Civil War. By 1860, almost 200,000 slaves resided in Texas alone. Some tribes forced out of their homelands in the southeast had brought slaves as well, like Roberts’ ancestors, to Oklahoma. It’s from this history of settler colonialism and western expansion in the later part of the nineteenth century that many Black people reached the western part of the United States. After the Civil War, many freed Black men in the West worked as cowboys — herding and taking care of livestock.
“If we start with the class analysis lens, it would be important to think of them as workers. These were men doing the work of landowners; oligarchs who owned massive tracts of land,” said Liza Black, an assistant professor of History and Native American and Indigenous Studies at Indiana University-Bloomington and a Visiting Scholar at UCLA’s Institute of American Cultures and American Indian Studies Center. “The work they were doing had to do with taking care of cattle — rounding them up, feeding, locating, branding, etc.”
Black is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and author of “Picturing Indians” about the depictions of Native Americans in film between 1941 and 1960. She explains that the cattle industry intertwined with the real estate and railroad building industries, which factored into the dispossession of Native people west of the Mississippi River.
Historians estimate that around 1 in 4 cowboys were Black, so to some extent, these men were also a part of settler colonialism during the period of Manifest Destiny and western expansion. Cowboy and former slave Nat Love (known as “Dead Wood Dick”) talked about fighting Native Americans defending their land in his 1907 autobiography.
Black argues that these occurrences are part of both the fascinating and complicated parts of Black cowboy history, but she also advises us to parse out the differences between the ranching work of cowboys versus the popularized aesthetics of cowboys. For Black, there’s a clear difference between cowboys working for landowners during western expansion to the all-black Harlem rodeo to Lil Nas X’s and “Old Town Road” to Black people who work with farm animals or ride horses.
“To me, the men who made the jump into rodeos or Wild West shows do a different type of work,” Black said. “It was a Black cowboy who invented the rodeo competition of lassoing a calf and subduing it to the ground. So I would distinguish these types of work from the work of the late 19th century.”
Over 100 years later, the iconography of the Black cowboy has slowly made its way into history and culture. There have been attempts to rectify this over the years: from vigilante justice films like Posse to Concrete Cowboy to the upcoming western “The Harder They Fall.” An episode of “High on the Hog: How African American Cuisine Transformed America” focused on Black cowboys and their cuisine.
Roberts says that much of what we catch on television or films is very laudatory and tries to generally correct the narrative without thinking about the fact that Native Americans exist. But she said that “Buffalo Soldiers” is one film that provides more nuance.
“I think that film actually does have some nuance because it shows how many African Americans men are using service in the military to prop up their masculinity and define themselves as free men, and the racism they endured.” said Roberts. “But it also shows the struggle they faced dealing with Native Americans. They recognize this is a part of their service, but also recognize Natives as oppressed people.”
Black cowboys embody some of the longstanding tensions between history and memory. Many of them were former slaves (some of whom were owned by Native tribes) who later took part (both directly and indirectly) in western expansion and the theft of both land and resources from Native Americans.
We can honor them by providing a more nuanced account about their contribution to American history, without succumbing to the allure of American mythology.
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of Joshua Adam's work on Medium.
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