Tricia Wagner - Black Cowboys of the Old West: True, Sensational, And Little-Known Stories From History, First Edition

Copyright 2011 by Tricia Martineau Wagner

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Project editor: David Legere

Text design: Sheryl P. Kober

Layout: Melissa Evarts

Map: Melissa Baker Morris Book Publishing, LLC

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wagner, Tricia Martineau.

Black cowboys of the Old West : true, sensational, and little-known stories from history / Tricia Martineau Wagner.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-7627-6071-8

1. African American cowboysWest (U.S.)History19th century. 2. African American cowboysWest (U.S.)Biography. 3. African AmericansWest (U.S.)History19th century. 4. Ranch lifeWest (U.S.)History19th century. 5. RodeosWest (U.S.)History19th century. 6. Wild west showsHistory19th century. I. Title.

F596.W25 2011

978'.02dc22

2010039725

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my family, Mark, Kelsey, and Mitch ~ I am blessed.

The life was hard and in some ways exacting, yet it was free and wild and contained the element of danger which my nature craved.

NAT LOVE, 18541921

The cowboythe symbol of the American Westbecame the personification of courage, skill, and rugged individualism to onlookers. People view the gun-toting, tough-minded, levelheaded cowboy as the embodiment of raw masculinity, a master horseman and an expert shot. In reality most cowboys were poor shots and were disallowed from carrying weapons on ranches. The highly regarded broncobusters were master horsemen, but they were the exception rather than the rule. Nonetheless, the cowboy remains bigger than life. The quintessential cowboy is a composite figure; no one person characterizes the man. Yet he represents an exceptional breed of men uniquely loyal in purpose and seemingly unencumbered by responsibility other than to himself. Twenty-first-century Americans continue to live vicariously through the cowboy; secretly, nobody wants to be hemmed in.

As the American cowboy rode the range, he became a national folk heroa cultural icon so romanticized that he morphed into a mythological figure of epic proportions. With the passage of time, the lover of history, fiction, music, and art, while seeking to know the cowboy, inadvertently contributed to deifying him.

However, the image of the American cowboy has been packaged and marketed as a white entity. American Western literature produced a plethora of pulp fiction that popularized the cowboy myth and immortalized him in the American psyche. Owen Wisters 1902 book, The Virginian, was widely recognized as the first cowboy novel, but it did not contain one black cowboy, nor did Andy Adamss 1903 well-read book, The Log of a Cowboy. The stories of white cowboys were written by white authors for a white audience.

The film industry also did its fair share to create such imagery: American cowboys became legendary heroes fabulously glamorized by the Hollywood Western picture show. Even the actor portraying Jim Beckwourth, the famous black frontiersman and trailblazer of the 1800s, was played by a white man in a 1950 film. In reality, the cowboys of the American West were also of Hispanic, African-American, and Native American descent. Until recently their stories have been largely untold. AS one descendant of a black cowboy explained, We didnt write the books. We didnt produce the movies. So we were politely deleted. There is a conspicuous absence of the black cowboy recorded in the history of the American cattle-ranching industry. The role these men played in the settling of the Old West deserves scholarly attention.

As a youngster, Paul Stewart never read about black cowboys in Western fiction. He erroneously concluded there was no such thing until the day he saw a black cowboy in Denver, Colorado, in the 1930s. Forty years later, Stewart opened the Black American West Museum and Heritage Center in Denver to fill a void in history. In 1991 cowboy Cleo Hearn established the Cowboys of Color Rodeo Tour, a multicultural rodeo open to African-American, Hispanic, and Native American cowboys and cowgirls. Hearn was five years old when he saw his first black cowboy in 1944, and it left an indelible impression.

The ten remarkable men in Black Cowboys of the Old West