Cowboys of Color: Their Untold Story in the West and Hollywood
Cowboys are beloved by Americans for being Machiavellian, courageous, gunslinging, white men.
When it comes to cowboys, you may already be familiar with the legendary Western characters of film: The lawless Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the desperados in Sergio Leone’s The Good the Bad and the Ugly, or the masked cowboy The Lone Ranger, who inspired the entire trope of the solitary but well-intentioned cowboy.
These movies were all made in the 50s and 60s at a time when anything set in the Wild West brought in insurmountable revenue for theatres. And yet, from 2010 to the present day, the United States has churned out more than one-hundred different cowboy-themed films alone, showing that Westerns are still captivating audiences at a bountiful rate.
Cowboys are beloved by Americans for being Machiavellian, courageous, gunslinging, white men. Yet, showing only white cowboys in the media contradicts their more realistic history since more than half of all cowboys were Black or Latinx.
White cowboys have been mythologized and romanticized while the numerous contributions of cowboys of color in America have been overlooked. This has led the way for their stories to be left out of both our history books and silver screens. Delving into the origins of the cowboy and its gradual whitewashing helps explain why no one knows about the valiant lives of the cowboy of color.
Although the concept of the cowboy has gradually transformed into a symbol of Americanism, cowboys are not an American invention. The Spanish began shipping cows into present-day New Mexico starting in 1598, which led to the eventual increase in cattle ranches across the southwest. American ranchers at the time did not know how to raise cattle so instead, they commissioned Mexican men, known as vaqueros (from the Spanish word for cow), to look after their farms. According to the History Channel, “By the early 1700s, ranching made its way to present-day Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and as far as Argentina. When the California missions started in 1769, livestock practices were introduced to more areas in the west.”
As the popularity of beef products rose in the United States, more cowboys were hired by southern ranchers, and eventually, from the late 1700s onwards, cattle ranching — or being a cowboy — became a well-established profession in North America held mostly by Mexican men.
The terms and style most commonly associated with cowboys come from vaqueros too:
- Ranch comes from the Spanish word rancho.
- The term for the roundup of cattle comes from the Spanish word rodeo.
- The “ten-gallon-hat” cowboys wear comes from the Spanish word galón which means braid in Spanish. The sombreros that Mexican cowboys wore held braids — oftentimes ten braids, so “10 galón”.
- The word cowboy comes from vaqueros in which vaca means cow.
Unfortunately, the job was extremely demanding and unstable. “The Cowboy Class Wars” by Mark A. Lause describes how cowboys had to work gruesome hours: oftentimes 108-hours a week from Monday through Saturday. Not for the faint of heart, being a cattle rancher required a remarkable level of dedication and the ability to move nomadically through the oftentimes lonely prairie. During the winter, when cowboys weren’t needed as much, they would roam the west looking for a new ranch to work on, and would likely move again the following year when winter inevitably returned.
Until the early 1850s, there weren’t many Black or white cowboys in the United States. The few white cowboys in the west were typically unsuccessful gold miners, while African-American’s had not yet been freed from slavery (although some enslaved Americans tended to ranches in the south while their slave owners fought in the Civil War).
That all changed with the passing of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and the end of the Civil War in 1865, which marked the end of institutionalized slavery in Southern states. This left newly freed slaves and former soldiers in need of a steady income, so they poured into the west on the recently finished Transcontinental Railroad. Notoriously built by the forced labor of 12,000+ Chinese immigrants, it made traveling from coast to coast significantly more convenient and allowed those living in the east to seek new job opportunities in the less developed west.
Soon, by the late 1860s, more than 25% of cowboys were Black.
The Wild West wasn’t always the picturesque landscape of tumbleweeds and open sky; deep racism stained the land and colored the experiences of non-white cowboys permanently.
Racism in the 1800s was both unquestioned and overt, mostly to laborers like cattle ranchers. Tennessee native Nat Love wrote an extensive autobiography aptly named The Life and Adventures of Nat Love that describes his life as an African-American cowboy following the period after the Civil War — one of the only first-hand accounts of a cowboy of color from that time.
Love gives a detailed account of his transition from slavery to freedom and constantly mentions how after being enslaved for so long, his tongue had a taste for the wild and liberating west. He decided to move to Kansas during a migration period known as the “Kansas Exodus” when Kansas became romanticized as a place of equal treatment, mainly because it was the home state of abolitionist John Brown.
Love settled down in a town called Dodge City, which gained a reputation for being the place to be if you wanted to make a name for yourself in the world of cattle ranching. And yet, as the chains of slavery disappeared, they were replaced by the equally restrictive chains of segregation.
Dodge City’s class differences were built into the architecture. This is most apparent in the city’s affluent north side and impoverished south side. Described as an early form of zoning, the city had a railroad that “cut its main thoroughfare in half: north of the tracks sat a Main Street worthy of a small town with a respectable, church-going population. To the south lay the brawling, gambling, uncivilized world that catered to the cowboys with saloons, dance halls, and brothels.”
Coincidentally, Nat Love recounts in his autobiography how when he arrived at Dodge City, the supposedly well-established cow town did not meet his expectations. Love describes:
“…I eventually brought up at Dodge City, Kansas, which at that time was a typical frontier city, with a great many saloons, dance halls, and gambling houses, and very little of anything else.”
Dodge City, heaven for the white cowboy, proved to be the opposite for people of color.
Legend has it that the very first person killed in Dodge City was a Black man named Tex who was shot after going outside to watch a duel between two white men. No one knows if he was killed in their crossfire or on purpose.
Over time, the most popular Western films began to portray cowboys as staunch defenders of the law instead of cattle ranchers or horse breakers. This archetype came from the stories of another enslaved Black man named Bass Reeves who successfully escaped his plantation in Arkansas and relocated to a section of Oklahoma owned by five different Native American Tribes. There, he learned the languages of the Seminole and Creek tribes and hid in their company until the Emancipation Proclamation passed in 1863.
Immediately after Reeves legally became a free man, he got married, had eleven children, and didn’t return to Native American territory until over a decade later. When he did, however, a state marshal in the region noticed how warm the Native Americans were to Reeves because he knew the area like the back of his hand and could speak some of their languages too. He asked if Reeves would be interested in becoming a deputy marshal for over 75,000 square miles of territory in Oklahoma and Reeves accepted right away.
This occupation cemented Reeves’ name in history as he went on to become one of the most successful marshals in the then lawless west — and the very first Black one at that. His incomparable skill with a gun, peaceful correspondence with Native American people, and love of justice was said to have inspired one of the most popular Western characters of all time, The Lone Ranger.
Undoubtedly one of the most recognized figures in Western cinematic history, The Lone Ranger personified many American’s aspirations at the time of the film’s debut in 1958: He could bridge the miscommunication gap between people within and outside of the Indigenous community, gallantly fought off bandits on the otherwise chaotic frontier, and possessed an insatiable empathy that stopped him from ever shooting his enemies. Ironically, however, this white cowboy’s entire narrative was based on the life of Reeves.
The movie stripped Reeves of his legacy and pasted it onto a white actor who made unsurmountable amounts of money off of a Black man’s story. The cowboys we are most likely to see in the media do not come from a wide range of cultures and backgrounds like the cowboys of history. Instead, they reflect an America that enjoyed the stories of brave cowboys of color but idolized the white race too much to show people of color on screen.
As BBC News journalist Sarfraz Manzoor wrote:
“The west was where white men were able to show their courage. But if a black man could be heroic and have all the attributes that you give to the best qualities in men, then how was it possible to treat a black man as subservient or as a non-person?”
To give a person of color a leading role as a cowboy would humanize them, so it was rarely done. At a time when many the only available roles for Black actors were that of a jazz musician, convicted convict, or violent predator, a film with a Black cowboy would have been unheard of. What this did is solidify white people, in the minds of Americans, as being the only race of people who were ever cowboys. The history of Spanish, Mexican, or African-American cowboys got erased in favor of an image that white audiences would have found more palatable. Leah William states eloquently in an article for The Atlantic that,
“Whenever Westerns spring back into relevance, they resort to the same habits of misrepresentation. The result is that racial ignorance has been stratified, brick by brick, into the foundations of the genre on the groundless basis of historical accuracy.”
We have subconsciously accepted the narrative that cowboys are white which closes the door for future portrayals of cowboys of color. More mediums today are slowly integrating cowboys of color into the foreground of major motion productions with films like The Hateful Eight or Django Unchained coming to mind. But those roles are few and far between. What makes this lack of acknowledgment so unfortunate is that cowboys of color have had their real-life experiences taken from them and pasted onto a screen to be played by white actors.
Regardless, of the cowboy’s misrepresentation, people today still want to reinstate the legacy of cowboys of color in history. This push towards representation is found within the cowboy of color community, with real cattle ranchers like 88-year-old Cleveland Walters speaking out about the racism he experienced early in his career. Walters says that if you were not white, you were expected to complete tasks that would nearly kill you. He was told by his boss to physically hold down wild, bucking cows while his white counterpart only had to brand the cattle. Essentially, the Black people were doing all of the “dirty work” as he put it.
Then you have young artists like Brad Trent who uses photography to celebrate the lives of members of The Federation of Black Cowboys. The photos are stunning and my favorite one is a Black and white portrait of a Black, female cattle rancher; Her heavy and tasseled leather jacket, long locks, and wide-brimmed cowboy hat make her look fearless and powerful — both of which she probably is. Trent says that his work is devoted to
“…telling the true story of Black cowboys’ heritage while providing educational opportunities for local youth to learn from the values and traditions of cowboy life”
a statement that is a testimony to why exposure to cowboys of color is so instrumental. Cowboys of color have been treated as less than white cowboys, and yet, they persisted. And their persistence is still within every person who is a descendant of a cowboy of color but may never know it.
No matter the hardship or mistreatment, cowboys of color constantly rise to the occasion. Their stories reflect true courage because despite the deep-rooted racism that traveled west with the railway, they traveled bravely into the the unknown. These are the stories that Hollywood chooses to ignore. Pretending that all cowboys are white is a conscious way to block out the decades of racism faced by cowboys of color and erase their heroism.
Western-themed media is unquestionably here to stay, so I think it’s time that Americans finally question why most of the cowboys they see on-screen are white.
