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Were there really african american cowboys like you see in movies? I was watching Lonesome Dove with one of my idiot friends and he saw Danny Glover and was like, “yeah right, black people were slaves back then, not hired hands.” This got me thinkin, did his statement have any truth to it? Also, according to the HBO show Deadwood, black people owned shops/business’ and stables too. How were black people really treated in certain parts of the wild west?
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I heard the joke that went, "The Lone Ranger turns to Tonto and says, “Tonto, we’re surrounded by wild indians. What are we going to do?” Tonto turns to the Lone Ranger and replies, “What you mean ‘we,’ white man?” which also got me thinking, put “a black man” in Tonto’s place and the joke works just as well. So what were relations between black people and Indians really like?
- There were at least a few. http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/II/fik3.html
I’d be surprised if there were more slaves than black freemen by the middle of the 19th century. But I really have no idea what I’m talking about, so don’t listen to me.
diggleblop, you and you friend do realize that slavery ended in 1865, don’t you?
And you realize that the major era of the cowboys and the Wild West was 20 years later, right?
Yeah, even though it ended, doesn’t mean people stopped practicing it, especially in those parts of the world.
Not to mention, even if one of us didn’t know, that’s why this site is here, right? 
Wow. Just…wow. :rolleyes:
See Exapno Mapcase’s post. And yes, there were black cowboys.
Yes, it did. There would have been very little extra-legal black involuntary servitude in the American west post Civil War. (And even pre-Civil War, much of the West was anti-slavery anyway.)
Cowboys were pretty much manual laborers. There is no particular reason that blacks would be rejected for such work, any more than they would be for building railroads or digging ditches.
Nearly 1/3 of the cowboys in the “wild west” were African Americans. What we think of as the “wild west” was actually post Civil War so slavery status did not apply. Remember that labor was rather short because of the recent war so blacks would have been used as were Mexicans.
A black middle class began to emerge following the Civil War. Blacks were not allowed, or at the very least were discouraged, from interacting with whites. These black merchants, hotel owners, etc., catered to the black community for the most part.
Has some interesting information.
Marc
I believe it is primarily cowboy movies that instilled the idea that there were few African American cowboys. I didn’t know there were so many of them until I took an American History course in college.
Marc
So why are there so few African Americans in the Southwestern states then?
As others have said, there were a lot of black cowboys. Despite its mythology, driving cattle was seen as unskilled labor back in the actual time it was occurring. Having a job as a cowboy back then was the equivalent of having a job pumping gas. So cowboys were people like blacks and hispanics who were at the bottom of the social ladder.
Being a cowboy was a transient lifestyle. If you weren’t working you went off and looked for a job somewhere else. Once the cattle drives ended the cowboys moved on. The people who are currently living in the west are primarily the descendants of farmers or townspeople.
Deadwood Dick was probably the most famous black cowboy, though there were plenty in the Old West.
For what it’s worth, rodeo is one sport that was never integrated. Black rodeo is still going strong. It doesn’t draw as many people as more mainstream rodeo, but at least until recently it tended to be less flashy and more like a cowboy competition around the corral.
- They could be very close. Blacks were frequently adopted into Indian tribes, and often acted as cultural middle-folk between whites and Indians. Among the Creeks, for example, blacks were the first to convert to Christianity. They then sanitised it for a Creek audience and proceeded to become some of the Creek Nation’s most beloved preachers, much to the chagrin of many white missionaries.
That said, there were Indian slaveholders–mostly the economic elite. It was this elite that supported the Confederacy during the Civil War, at least in the Indian Territory.
Right now, there’s an issue with the Cherokee, because they’ve recently disenfranchised the blacks who descended from freedmen adopted into the Cherokee nation after the Civil War. It’s caused a lot of tension, especially since many of those freedmen are very much culturally Cherokee–some even speak Cherokee as a first language.
Now, that’s sort of an Eastern perspective. In the West, blacks were still frequently adopted into the tribes. However, the wholesale shipping-off of freed slaves to the West was strongly opposed by Indians, for the same reason that they opposed white settlement: the trickle of people would rapidly become a torrent.
A good book on black/Indian relations is Zellar’s African Creeks.
I don’t follow. You might as well ask me why there are so many black people in Detroit when there weren’t all that many there in the 19th century. As others have already answered cowboys were pretty much at the bottom rung of the social ladder, they tended to move to wherever they could find work, and what we think of as the golden age of the cowboy, complete with cattle drives, lasted only a few short years. The question in the OP is specifically referring to the “wild west” days which I interpret as existing in the latter half of the 19th century following the Civil War. Heck, were cowboys a significant percentage of the population in those days?
Marc
It was actually a pretty uncommon job. I once read that there were four times as many miners in the “old west” as there were cowboys.
Do you suppose that blacks had an easier time becoming merchants in places like Deadwood as opposed to established Eastern cities? I would think when times are hard, the cost of racism and/or segregation would be higher. For example, if I wanted to buy a quart of whiskey or a hotel room in Atlanta, I could easily skip black businesses, but may not have that luxury on the Frontier.
And freed and escaped slaves started banding with the Seminoles down in Florida as early as the 17th Century.
Perhaps because there weren’t many cowgirls.
African Americans, on occasion, were members of the Wild West’s law enforcement community 