Black cowboys

Black cowboys, African American horsemen who wrangled cattle in the western United States in the late 1800s and beyond. Though they were almost entirely excluded from the mythology of the American cowboy, it is estimated that Black men accounted for nearly a quarter of all cattle workers in the nascent American West during the latter half of the 19th century. In the years following the Civil War (1861–65) and emancipation from slavery, a budding ranching industry promised freedom and prosperity unknown to most Black Americans, many of whom were formerly enslaved themselves or were the children of enslaved parents.

Since the 1700s Black enslaved workers had been charged with watching over and driving livestock in the American South. For example, by 1800 in Louisiana Black men on plantations were being tasked with supervising large herds of cattle. Nowhere were enslaved cattle workers more prevalent than in the Texas territory, where the livestock industry had been dominant since the Spanish colonization of the area in the late 1600s. Texas became part of the United States in 1845, and, by 1860, enslaved people accounted for 30 percent of the state’s population. Among them were some of the first Black cowboys: skilled laborers with experience in breaking horses and herding stock. Many were given the autonomy to work unsupervised, and some even carried guns.

When Texas joined the Confederacy in 1861, many white ranchers left their land to fight in the east, leaving their enslaved cowhands to tend the herds of cattle. In the years following the Civil War, these ranchers struggled to keep their cattle populations from disarray, a development spurred on by a lack of land demarcation—barbed wire would not be invented until 1874—and the loss of enslaved workers, who left ranches after news of emancipation finally reached Texas on June 19, 1865. To round up their herds, white ranchers were compelled to hire newly freed Black cowhands.

While emancipation gave legal freedom to Black people throughout the South, real independence evaded most. Being a cowboy offered people genuine self-governance, at least in theory, and many African Americans who left the South after the failures of Reconstruction migrated to cattle country, particularly Kansas. This mass migration was dubbed the Great Exodus, and its migrants were known as “exodusters.” These Black pioneers were drawn West by new land laws such as the Homestead Act of 1862, which allowed settlers to claim 160 acres (65 hectares) of government-surveyed land as long as they “improved” it through cultivation. Many exodusters trained as ranch hands and drovers in their new environs.

The American cattle industry grew rapidly from 1860 to 1880. Railroads had not yet proliferated, so cattle had to be driven great distances by workers on horseback in order to be sold and processed in other states. Black cowboys participated in a great number of these drives, on which they discovered fairly egalitarian working conditions for the time. On the trail, Black and white drovers often fraternized and sometimes traveled in the same groups. Segregation was generally unimportant on the vast expanses of the open range, though Black wranglers were commonly expected to carry out certain menial tasks in mixed groups. Black cowboys did, however, regularly encounter racism when passing through settlements, where they were separated from their white counterparts in some establishments and outright banned from others, including hotels and restaurants.

The cowboys that participated in the great cattle drives of the 1870s and ’80s came to symbolize the grit and rugged individualism of the pioneer. Many were regarded as heroes and became popular figures. While white cowboys received most of the attention, some Black cowboys—such as Nat Love—were well known. Love was rumored to have driven cattle through eight states, fought off raids by Native Americans, and ridden alongside such legends as Billy the Kid and Buffalo Bill Cody.

Similarly, a number of Black cowboys made names for themselves at rodeos, which became a popular part of cowboy culture in the 1870s and provided a venue in which cowboys could showcase their skills for the public. One of the most famous of these showmen was Bill Pickett (1870?–1932). Pickett is said to have invented “bulldogging,” a rodeo event in which the cowboy on horseback rides down a steer before rapidly dismounting and wrestling the animal to the ground. He performed at rodeos and Wild West shows until about 1916 and worked as a cowhand and rancher thereafter. He later appeared in the silent films The Bull-Dogger (1921) and The Crimson Skull (1922).

In the early 1900s the prevalence of cowboys on the range declined as railroads made cattle drives obsolete, though white cowboys persisted in the American imagination. Their popularity peaked in the middle of the 20th century, when western films and novels found success in depicting the daring exploits of cowboys. In these popular retellings of how Americans conquered the wild West, the role of Black cowboys—much like the role of African American buffalo soldiers—was greatly diminished, an oversight that modern historians, filmmakers, novelists, and Black heritage groups have sought to remedy. Groups such as the Oakland Black Cowboy Association, the New York City Federation of Black Cowboys, Philadelphia’s Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club, and the Compton Cowboys have worked to both showcase and continue the legacy of Black cowboys as part of African American heritage, while rodeos such as the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo memorialize the contributions of Black cowboys and cowgirls to American culture.