African American Cowboys…according to Bennie J. McRae, Jr., in his 1996 book Lest We Forget, “the traditional history of the American West almost totally ignores the role of black cowboys and other pioneers who traversed and settled in the West west of the Mississippi during the nineteenth century.”
McRae said… out of about 35,000 cowboys who worked the ranches and rode the trails, between five and nine thousand were African Americans.
However, the well-known Red River portrays not one black cowboy riding the Goodnight-Loving Trail in the late nineteenth century.
It is estimated that one in four cowboys in the Wild Wild West were black, so why aren’t black cowboys more prevalent in popular culture?
Many Black pioneers crossed the vast territory west of the Mississippi in the nineteenth century and settled there,”
Moreover, McRae said:
“History books and Hollywood successfully erased blacks from the historical record of the West.”
Trailblazers of sorts, they were…
Here are some historic Black cowboys who helped shape the Old West.
Nat Love… Born in June 1854
“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 tiny of anything else.” – The Life and Adventures of Nat Love.
In his 1907 autobiography,
Black cowboy Nat Love recounts tales about his life on the frontier that read like scenes from a Lonesome Dove film.
Little-known facts,
Nat Love described Dodge City, Kansas, as a town strewn with the romanticized institutions of the frontier: ” many saloons, dance halls, and gambling houses, but not much else.”
He moved enormous cattle from one pasture to another, drank with Billy the Kid, and engaged in shootouts on the trails with Native Americans defending their land.
When he wasn’t fighting Indians, he engaged in activities such as “dare-devil riding, roping, shooting, and such.”
A trailblazing, sharpshooting, horseback riding cowboy embodies the spirit of the American West better than any other image.
“Deadwood Dick.”
During these years as an Arizona cowboy, Nat was referred to as Red River Dick and claimed to have met many famous men of the West, including Pat Garrett, Bat Masterson, and Billy the Kid.
Further reading: The Life and Adventures of Nat Love Better Known in the Cattle Country as “Deadwood Dick,” by Himself (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Bill Pickett (1870-1932), African American Cowboy
- Successful showman and cowboy
- Invented the art of “bulldogging.”
Besides being a cowboy, Bill Pickett was also a performer. He showed tremendous skill with horses and achieved fame for a technique he developed for steer wrestling, called “bulldogging.”
Growing Up
Bill Pickett’s actual birth year is uncertain, but he was the second of 13 children born to Thomas Jefferson Pickett, a formerly enslaved person, and Mary “Janie” Gilbert.
The family’s ancestry was African, white, and Cherokee.
The family lived in an area of Texas known as Jenks Branch Community.
A family named Miller, who opened the land for other African Americans to come after the Civil War, settled the land.
Legend has it that Bill Pickett was 5’7″ and weighed 145 pounds. He must have been all muscle.
Ranch Life
In 1890, Pickett married Maggie Turner, a formerly enslaved person and daughter of a white southern plantation owner. The couple had nine children.
By 1888, Pickett and his brothers started their horse-breaking and cowboy services company in Taylor, Texas.
The company was known as the Pickett Brothers Bronco Busters and Rough Riders Association. Their advertisements promised: “Catch and taming wild cattle is a specialty.”
Invented the Art of Bulldogging
Pickett developed the bulldogging method because bulldogs were sometimes used to help stop a runaway steer.
Pickett decided that if a bulldog could bring down a steer, so could he. He practiced riding after a steer, springing from his horse, and wrestling the steer to the ground.
He then bit and held the steer’s lip himself until the steer had still. He became known as the “bulldogger.”
Pickett gave exhibitions in Texas and throughout the West, usually riding his horse Spradley.
- In 1905, he signed on with the 101 Ranch Show (similar to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.
- In 1907, he joined the 101 Ranch full-time.
While African-American cowboys aren’t featured in the popular narrative, historians estimate that one in four cowboys were black.