Black Cowboys

BRENT HOLMES (NARRATION): Cowboy. Let’s break that term down.

[Sounds of horses galloping, gunshots and distant yelling]

In English, the original term for a person who tended cattle was a “cowherd”. The term “cowboy” was first used in print by Irish satirist Jonathan Swift in 1725 to describe children assigned the task of walking cattle and assisting cowherds.

From that humble beginning, the cowboy has become a central figure in the story America tells itself.

[Sound of cowbell rapidly ringing turns into a rhythmic beat]

Ruggedly self-sufficient, the cowboy stands apart. He’s a representation of masculinity and white supremacy, un-reliant on the surrounding culture. This image is so entwined with our national character that “cowboy” is shorthand for Americans all over the world.

[Music develops into a bassy, club beat reminiscent of Snoop Dogg’s “Drop It Like It’s Hot”]

A radical individual existing beyond the normative freedoms bestowed upon any other group or class.

[Music fades out]

This is a myth, of course.

Almost every aspect of American life has been touched, if not outright invented, by Black folks. From music and fashion to the three-way traffic signal and the super-soaker, many of our most iconic cultural touchstones are imbued by irrefutable Blackness — but not the cowboy.

[Faint, laid-back music is heard in the background]

And yet, by some estimates, as many as 25% of cowboys in the West were Black. Another 35% were Latinx.

How many is that? Thousands.

So many that there’s a good chance that every major cattle drive included a Black cowboy or two.

In the early United States, before western expansion, the English meaning of cowboy was transposed to enslaved men of African descent who had been given the task of herding cows, a title befitting a class that could not be fully recognized to exist.

But after the Civil war, the term, like all things in America, began to move West.

[Sound of horses galloping and western style Americanana music]

No landscape looms larger in the perception of the United States at home and abroad than the West. Soaring mountain ranges, basins peppered with creosote and sagebrush, supine mesas — a land that is arid, windswept, and vast. It lends easy providence to the sublime.

The western era begins with the end of our nation’s greatest ideological conflict. The Civil War remains the first major statement in the long national dialogue surrounding America’s use, mistreatment, and obligation to Black minds and bodies. After the war, many freed slaves headed West, their skills in agriculture and ranching providing them new opportunities and something else: an unprecedented amount of personal freedom.

[Horses galloping and western, ho-down music plays in the background]

To talk about the Black cowboy is, inevitably, to talk about Nat Love.

The cowboy autobiographer is probably the most famous Black cowboy in American history with the possible exception of Texas’ “lone ranger” Bass Reeves.

[The Lone Ranger theme plays]

Yes, the Lone Ranger was Black.

So exceptional were Reeves’ exploits that they became catalogued and fictionalized. Somehow, a semi-literate former slave who arrested more than 3,000 criminals, who was known for his use of disguise and for leaving a silver dollar as his calling card, became a black-masked hero with white skin. A gritty Afro-reality whisked into easy Anglo-fantasy with an ever-loyal brown sidekick.

[Relaxed, mellow acoustic music, indicative of an open road, is heard in the background]

But Nat Love wrote his own story — a whole book: The Life and Adventures of Nat Love better known in the Cattle Country as “Deadwood Dick” by Himself; a True History of Slavery Days, Life on the Great Cattle Ranges and on the Plains of the "Wild and Woolly" West, Based on Facts, and Personal Experiences of the Author.

[Music pauses for emphasis]

That’s the title. Yeah..that’s the title.

In its pages, we find love in one larger-than-life adventure after another: He tells readers about riding his horse into a bar, scattering a crowd before ordering drinks for himself and his horse. He writes about almost being forced to marry a tribal chief’s daughter, escaping only after seeming to go along with their plan. He describes earning the nickname Deadwood Dick from the citizens of Deadwood, South Dakota after he had defeated all comers in riding, roping, and shooting.

Whether the veracity of his claims holds up, he does meet the criteria for American legends of the era.

[Music fades out]

HOLMES: Hi, Lela.

LELA WALKER: Hi, how are you doing?

HOLMES: I’m good how are you?

WALKER: I’m doing awesome.

HOLMES: I really appreciate you taking the time...

BRENT HOLMES (NARRATION): By chance, I found one of Nat Love’s descendants, Lela Love-Walker, living in Las Vegas raising her five sons, all unaware of their ancestral legacy.

Lela and her eldest sons Anthony and Darion were kind enough to speak with me about their notable progenitor.

HOLMES: Yeah, there’s a film; there’s actually a comic book. He’s included in almost every book about Blackness in the American West, and really one of the few Cowboys that wrote his own autobiography, which you can find online, by the way, for free. It’s a lot of purple prose, but it’s actually a really fascinating read with illustrations, and it explains everything from his early life as a slave all the way up until his retirement age from being a cowboy.

WALKER: So, before this, did you think that Black people would be in those stories like what your grandma watches, the Westerns and stuff like that?

ANTHONY: No, because, at my grandma’s house, when the shows are on about the Western, there is no Black people in those shows besides white people playing as cowboys.

DARION: Yeah. When she told me, I was a little surprised, honestly. I didn’t know any of that. It’s kind of cool though.

WALKER: Right, it gave me a sense of ownership being out here in the West. A lot of what I hear, either you were born a slave and then ended up being sharecroppers or farmers. Everybody’s from the south, you know what I’m saying?

That’s the story of my stepfather’s heritage or life. Most of the history and culture is the enslavement of our ancestors. So, it just seemed, again, like I had some sense of ownership to the west. And to have something else to say that we not only helped build America, not only through just slavery –

HOLMES: Before this, what did you see when you saw a cowboy or when you thought about the idea of a cowboy in the United States?

ANTHONY: So, what I visioned is there’s these small towns, and then they’re just...I’m not good at using description words.

WALKER: [laughs] It’s okay.

DARION: I think he means when they used to do standoffs and all the cowboy stuff.

ANTHONY: Yeah! That’s what I mean. And then, when I picture that, I don’t really see as much Black people, but when you bring a Black person into it, that’s like a whole other story for me.

WALKER: Well, for me, I’m not going to lie, when I saw his picture, I was like, “he’s kinda cool ain't he?” Just some of the pictures that we had seen, my husband was like, “oh no, I’m getting that picture blown up. It’s going in our house.”

HOLMES: Yeah, I’m very, very familiar with this image. It’s on the cover of three books, and he’s gorgeous. And you can’t deny it. He knows he’s beautiful. He knows he’s handsome. He know he fine.

WALKER: It’s just him. His hair looked like it was blown out [laughs]. It was tilted to the side. He had, I guess they would like to say, a whole bunch of swag going on.

ANTHONY: I thought it was super different. It was super different.

HOLMES: One of the things that I find fascinating about the Black cowboy specifically, because the cowboy is this icon of independence and confidence and of American might, and to not be able to incorporate that into the identities of Black folks.

That’s the discussion I want to have. As Black people in the United States, we’re told a lot about where we fit into history, but so much of it is opaque.

WALKER: Yeah, it’s very limited. It’s a certain type of confidence that he had. That is something that I feel should be a part of what we’re learning and a little bit more available to the masses.

[Classic upbeat Western music plays]

BRENT HOLMES (NARRATION): The Western era marked a high point in the liberties that a Black person like Nat Love could enjoy if they took up the cowboy mantle.

Segregation and bigotry aren’t very tenable when you’re tending a thousand head of livestock in open, dangerous country. The wild in Wild West meant steady travel across lawless plains in the service of the largest agricultural event of the time without the same social hierarchies placed upon Black people in cities and towns overrun by cultural convention and law enforcement, a kind of liberty most modern people can’t even comprehend. Massive wide-open spaces, landscapes that defy description, the silence of the wilderness and its indifference. In open country, one can find moments where the world has no masters.

[Horses galloping and mellow, soft music is heard in the background]

Jim Crow laws were in their fledgling period in the southeast and couldn’t spread effectively west during this period of rapid growth. To live as a cowboy was to be part of a rare moment of Black meritocracy, your value in society a reflection of your skill and alacrity in your trade, and, financially, it sure beat sharecropping.

The Wild West era was incredibly short. It began with the end of slavery and faded with the coming of the railroad. It was a period of immense social and technological change. For Nat Love, being a cowboy was just one of his careers. As the railroad began changing the American landscape, he became a Pullman porter, and, eventually, finished his life as a security guard in San Bernardino. I can only speculate what it must have been like to be born into slavery, become a cowboy, and live two decades into the 20th century.

For my part, it must be noted I come from cowboys. I was raised by a Texan Mother.

As a kid, we went to family roundups on our ranch in Egypt, Texas where we sat on an old barn and watched my older cousins rope and brand cattle.

Afterward, at the family reunion we rode horses, shot skeet, and ate a ton of pecan-wood-smoked meat.

I feel extremely privileged to have experienced a legacy lost to so many African Americans of my generation.

HOLMES: They got a rodeo every July, and, I'll be genuine, if you’ve never seen a Black man in a cowboy hat rope a steer to the Parliament Funkadelic, you’ve missed out on something really beautiful.

WALKER: Oh, I would love to go.

HOLMES: The invite is infinitely extended. So, whenever y’all can get there—

WALKER: Yeah! Because I would love to take all the boys there.

[Laid-back Western music, similar to that at the end of a cowboy movie, is heard in the background]

BRENT HOLMES (NARRATION): The erasure of people of color in the settler West is a two-fold problem. It withholds ownership of the building and development of the United States from Black and brown communities and it puts blinders on American identity. To incorporate Black cowboys into American iconography is to redefine one of the country’s core narratives. A story that is told for all its people is the true story of a nation.

While the Black cowboy should have become a figure of freedom and inspiration in Black culture, he has been one of its least acknowledged characters. Recently, though, artists like Solange Knowles, Mitski, Otis Kwame kye Quaicoe, and, of course, Lil Nas X have invoked the cowboy in an effort to reclaim it for Black Americans, to remind us that, while manifest destiny may not have a Black face, it’s really important to understand and be able to communicate about our ancestry, to have a really well-rounded depiction of ourselves, to see the value and the strides they made throughout their lives, and to compare those things to the strides we are trying to make in our lives, today.

[Music fades out]

That is the true gift of history.