The
stories and pictures of the Wild West
commonly feature white men, with little notion of the diversity present in the later half of the 19th century beyond
the various regiments of "buffalo soldiers". In reality,
black cowboys made up a large portion of the cowhand population, possibly a quarter of all cowboys.
Estimations range from 5,000 to
15,000 cowboys being of African heritage. Many have been forgotten in the passing of time, but some of their stories live on. For instance, the cowboy
Nat Love, the outlaw
Cherokee Bill, and (all sorts of awesome)
"Stagecoach" Mary Fields.
Nat Love was born in 1854 as a slave in Tennessee, but made his way west, to Kansas and then Texas, where he gained renown for horse-riding and gun skills, earning the name
Deadwood Dick (though
he was not the only one with that nickname). After years of being a cowhand,
Love saw the end of the cowboy era with the rise of the railroads, and got a job as a sleeping car porter. He published an autobiography in 1907:
The Life and Adventures of Nat Love (Archive.org; alt:
1995 reprint on Google books).
Born in 1876,
Crawford Goldsby was the son of George Goldsby, a mulatto sergeant of the
Tenth United States Cavalry, and Ellen (Beck) Goldsby, a
Cherokee Freedman, mixed with African, Indian and white ancestry.
His young life was rocky, including two years at the
Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an off-reservation boarding school in Pennsylvania. He returned to
Fort Gibson, in Indian Territory, where
it has been said that the 12-year-old Goldsby first killed a man - his brother-in-law who told the young Goldsby to feed the pigs. In other tellings,
Goldsby was 18 when he first shot a man. That same year, he got the alias Cherokee Bill, following a gunfight between
the Cook gang and a sheriff's posse. Cherokee Bill and the Cooks
earned a reputation for violence and theft, but evaded the law.
In 1895, Cherokee Bill was caught and tried for the murder of an innocent bystander during one of many robberies, for which he was found guilty. While in jail,
he attempted to break out, killing a guard in the process.
He was then tried, and found guilty, for a second murder.
His hanging drew a crowd of thousands on St. Patrick's Day, 1896.
Mary Fields was born in 1832, into slavery in Tennessee, where she was friends with the farm owner's daughter.
She was taught to read and write while a slave, and stayed on Judge Dunn's farm for some while following emancipation. Her childhood friend, Dolly Dunn, went on to become a
Ursiline nun. Dolly Dunn, then known as Sister Amadeus,
invited Mary Fields to join her at the Ursuline convent in Toledo, Ohio. Sister Amadeus was soon assigned to become the headmistress at
a convent in Montana, where she fell ill with pneumonia. Mary Fields hadn't first traveled out with Sister Amadeus, but now went to help her sick friend recover. After her friend, now Mother Amadeus, was better, Mary decided to stay on and help the nuns repair the building. Unfortunately,
Mary was too hot-tempered, and thought to set a bad example for the children (or maybe
the men in town were tired of her out-earning them, and maybe she shot a man in self defense), but she was sent away from the mission, with some financial backing from Mother Amadeus. Mary started a cafe, but was a poor cook with a big heart, and the restaurant ran out of money in short order. She was given
a mail route that she ran for eight years, where it was
her toughness and reliability that earned her the nickname Stagecoach Mary. She also
earned her reputation for being tougher than most any man, out-shooting, out-drinking and out-working them all. After her stagecoach days,
Mary was in her 70s, so she took it easy and opened a laundry service, though it's said she spent more time at the saloon than at the laundry shop. She also spent time in her garden, where she'd collect flowers to present to the local baseball team. For every game, she would fix buttonhole bouquet for the members of each team and five large bouquets for each of those who made home runs. She also offered her services as a babysitter for $1.50 a day, which she'd then spend on the little ones.
There are more tales, some truthful, some tall, on the 'net:
*
Who Were The Cowboys Behind 'Cowboy Songs'? - an NPR piece on the musical history of cowboys, including the African-American genre of the blues ballad (example:
Goodbye, Old Paint)
*
The Other All-Americans - Buffalo Soldiers and Black Cowboys, loads more links to profiles and histpry
*
BlackCowboys.com has a bit of information, hidden behind a series of linked pages that each open in a new window.
*
Lest We Forget is an archive of stories and information, though it seems the file names have changed a bit, so the articles don't link to each other any more (thus the weird index page link), including some
previous posts
Modern Black Cowboys:
*
Federation of Black Cowboys (NYC) - based at the
Cedar Lane Stables in Queens, New York, the FoBC formed in 1994 to share the group's common love of horses and the forgotten legacy of the Black West
*
Oakland Black Cowboy Association has spend over three decades sharing knowledge about the contributions of people of color in the settling of the West
Previosuly:
Urban Horsemen in Philadelphia - The Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club uses the urban cowboy pastime to steer young boys away from street violence
posted by absalom at 1:59 PM on February 25, 2011 [1 favorite]