The Negro Cowboys

Rating:
Summary: Adjusting the color of Western American history . . .
Review: I have known about this book for a long time and wish now that I'd read it years ago. It is a retelling of the Western American saga, with a focus on cattlemen and cowboys and, as the title indicates, the presence of black Americans among them. The all-white collective picture of the West is largely the creation of Hollywood, whose images and stories so dominate the memory of our own past.

The two UCLA professors whose research this book represents have done more than simply prove that there were large numbers of black cowboys. They hardly even take time to lament the erasure of blacks from this chapter of our history. Instead, they're eager to share with us what they've discovered in their research. And they enthusiastically assemble for us a social history of the Wild West that is peopled in nearly every walk of life with black Americans, both law-abiding and criminal, essentially reflecting the entire demographic of the West itself.

The book's chapters follow the spread of the cattle business from early days in Texas before the Civil War to the states west and north, reaching all the way to Montana by the 1880s. The great cattle drives are described, and using an extensive array of contemporary documents, the authors establish the role of young black men on horseback as equals to their white compatriots. Growing older, many became cooks for the cowboy crews, while younger and lesser-experienced black men wrangled the cowboys' horses.

Meanwhile, because newspapers tended to focus on violence and mayhem, the presence of many blacks in the American West has been recorded by the press in reports of shootings, murders, and other crimes. More typically blacks were victims, but that was not always the case. The more pastoral versions of some portrayals of the West pale in comparison with Durham and Jones' account, which tends to give a more tabloid sensationalism to their material.

Finally, the book gives us a vast panorama of men and women of all kinds participating in this mythic period of American history. Reading this book, you will have your mental picture of the Wild West illuminated by story after story, in the voices of those who lived and remembered those times. And your sense of American history will be thoroughly readjusted. Thanks again to the University of Nebraska Press for keeping another fine book in print.