Negro Cowboys: Reintegrating the Range

There was a lot more (and a lot less) to the Old West than meets the eye of the guy who watches "Gunsmoke" every Sunday night. Residents of the great Plains were economic men who had better things to do than sit around saloons waiting for a shoot-out or a moral dilemma. The broad side of barn doors represented the outer limit of marksmanship for most cowpokes, few of whom could afford to by guns or ammunition or target practice. Belle Starr and Calamity Jane looked more like Hoss Cartwright than Miss Kitty. Billy the Id has been described as an "adenoidal idiot." And until about 1890, when smokeless powder came into general use, acrobatic gun battles-with snipers falling off balconies into water trough-were unheard of, because each shot kicked up a cloud of acrid black smoke that soon blinded everybody.

The transition from stagecoach to TV screen emended or emasculated the frontier in countless ways. It shaved whiskers, canonized cutthroats, multiplied mortality rates, and taught the classics to hired killers. Most starting of all, it exterminated the Negro Cowboy. In the years-after the Civil War, more than 5000 Negroes rode with the great cattle drives from Texas to points north. Negro troops fought Indians, Negro burghers owned hotels and stores, and Negro outlaws rustled, murdered, and died on gallows under sentence from Judge Parker. But in novels and scenarios written for dude consumption, only the plots are black and white; the casts are all white.

The Negro Cowboys tries to explain the literary genocide that has erased the Negro from modern Westerns. According to Philip Durham and Everett Jones, two English teachers at U.C.L.A., the whitewashing of the legendary West began with Owen Wister's The Virginian, published in 1902. In an age that self-consciously hefted the white's man's burden and deplored the racial defects of immigrants, Wister gloried in the virtues of noble "Saxon boys" who conquered the frontier. Having met few Negroes in his own travels out West, Wister could see no reason to sully the racial purity of his novel. Other writers were not so passive in their bigotry; Thomas Dixon wrote a popular novel singing the praises of the Ku Klux Klan upon which "Birth of a Nation" was based.

Bleached Fiction

Novelists like Wister and Dixon made "Saxon pluck" a standard ingredient of best sellers. "The product was successful, and so it seemed foolish to vary the formula."

Durham and Jones feel that the scarcity of Negroes in Western fiction and drama is becoming more a matter of historical ignorance than of outright prejudice. Consumers of Westerns have gotten soused to an all-white West that writers and directors are afraid to shock them with the truth. "They feel that the accurate representation of the Negro's role in the opening of the West would paradoxically seem to be a falsification of history."

The Negro Cowboys reingrates the story of the West. The book does all the routine things: it follows cattle drives up the Chisholm Trail, discuses the economics of cattle ranching, tracks down desperadoes, and refights the Lincoln Country War. But in this account some af the characters are Negroes. And there the novelty ends. Durham and Jones don't brandish evidence in the face of a complacent public; they are satisfied simply with setting down records and anecdotes proving the prominence of the Negro in the Old West. They emphasize, in fact, that the lives of the Negro cowboys "were like those of all other cowboys-hard and dangerous."

The point of their history is not that they were different from their companions but that they were similar. They had neither peculiar virtues nor vices to be glorified or condemned.

The ordinariness of the Negro's experience says much about the Tocquevillian quality of frontier democracy. Negro cowhands rarely rose to the rank of trail foreman, and occasionally they were molested by rebels who had forgotten Appomattox, but most of them met with very little discrimination. The settlers of Wyoming voluntarily desegregated their first public school. Negroes won tall-tale reputations as cooks and bulldoggers, and as con-men and outlaws too. As Durham and Jones unfelicitously put it, "To be a good cowboy one needed first of all to be a good man, for a wild longhorn had no more respect for a white Texan than for a Negro."

But ordinariness (even morally commendable ordinariness) is closely akin to plain dullness. Frequently The Negro Cowboys slows down to a heavy-footed stagger. Since Negroes were at home in Western society, reminiscences about their exploits get just as mawkish as any Western yarns.

One of the prize personalities discovered by Durham and Jones is Nat Love, an ebullient egotist who claimed to have been the original and genuine Deadwood Dick. Whether or not he was an authentic folk hero, Love's biography typifies in many ways the story of all Negro cowboys who faded out of history into oblivion and stereotype. After a gaudily romantic career of herding cattle, rounding up mustangs, and getting drunk, Nat Love surrendered to the modern world when the railroads finally mechanized the cattle business around 1890. In that year, acting with grotesque symbolism, Love "traded his cowpony for an iron horse." He became a porter on a Pullman.