One in Four Cowboys Was Black — How Hollywood Whitewashed the American West

There is a scene that has been filmed so many times it has become the wallpaper of American mythology: a lone cowboy on horseback, silhouetted against the sunset, riding into the frontier with nothing but a rifle and the tacit understanding that the land before him is his for the taking. He is always white. He has been white for a hundred years of cinema, white for fifty years of television, white in the dime novels that preceded both, white in the national imagination from the first flickering nickelodeon to the latest streaming series. And this whiteness is a lie. Not a simplification, not an oversight, not the innocent result of limited casting pools or demographic ignorance. It is a deliberate, sustained, commercially motivated fabrication that erased one of the most significant chapters of Black American history and replaced it with a fantasy that has shaped how this nation understands itself, its past, and the people who built it.

The historical record is unambiguous. Approximately one in four cowboys in the post-Civil War American West was Black. The number may be higher. William Loren Katz, whose research in The Black West remains the foundational text on the subject, estimated that at least twenty-five percent of the thirty-five thousand men who drove cattle from Texas to Kansas between 1866 and 1895 were Black or Mexican. Philip Durham and Everett Jones, in their landmark study The Negro Cowboys, documented the same proportion. These were not marginal figures doing marginal work. They were the workforce that built the cattle industry, that opened the frontier, that established the towns and trails and traditions that Hollywood would later claim as the exclusive patrimony of white America.

The Men They Erased

Consider Nat Love, born enslaved in Tennessee in 1854, who went west at fifteen and became one of the most celebrated cowboys on the frontier. Love won the roping and shooting contests at a July 4th competition in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, in 1876, earning the nickname “Deadwood Dick” — a name that would later be appropriated for a series of dime novels featuring a white character. Love wrote his autobiography in 1907, The Life and Adventures of Nat Love, in which he described a career that included driving cattle across the Chisholm Trail, surviving encounters with hostile forces on the open range, and navigating the racial complexities of a frontier that was, by the standards of the post-Reconstruction South, relatively egalitarian. On the trail, a man was judged by his ability to ride, rope, and work. The racial hierarchy that governed life in the settled states was suspended, though not eliminated, by the practical demands of the cattle drive.

Consider Bass Reeves, born enslaved in Arkansas in 1838, who escaped to Indian Territory during the Civil War and became the most successful federal lawman in the history of the American West. Reeves served as a Deputy U.S. Marshal for thirty-two years, arrested more than three thousand felons, and was never wounded in a gunfight despite engaging in numerous shootouts. He spoke several Indigenous languages, was a master of disguise, and operated across a jurisdiction that covered seventy-five thousand square miles of some of the most dangerous territory in North America. The historical evidence strongly suggests that Bass Reeves was the inspiration for the Lone Ranger — a white fictional character who, in one of American culture’s most bitter ironies, wears a mask to conceal his identity.

“I was not made for a slave, no more than an eagle was made for a cage. I took my freedom the same way I took a horse — because I needed it and because nobody had a right to keep it from me.”
— Nat Love, from "The Life and Adventures of Nat Love," 1907

Consider Bill Pickett, born in Texas in 1870, who invented bulldogging — the rodeo technique of wrestling a steer to the ground by leaping from a horse, grabbing the animal by the horns, and twisting its neck. Pickett performed in rodeos across the United States and in Europe, including a command performance before the British royal family. He was inducted into the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in 1971 — the first Black honoree — decades after his death and long after the technique he invented had become one of the signature events of professional rodeo, performed exclusively by white competitors in the mainstream circuit.

Consider Mary Fields, born enslaved in Tennessee around 1832, who became the first Black woman to carry the U.S. mail when she was awarded a Star Route contract in Cascade, Montana, in 1895. Fields stood six feet tall, weighed two hundred pounds, carried a revolver under her apron, and drove the mail coach through territory where blizzards, wolves, and bandits were routine hazards. She never missed a day. When her horses could not pull the coach through deep snow, she strapped on snowshoes, slung the mailbag over her shoulder, and delivered on foot. The residents of Cascade called her “Stagecoach Mary.” She is mentioned in no major American history textbook.

The Buffalo Soldiers

The erasure extends beyond the cattle industry to the military history of the frontier. The Buffalo Soldiers — the all-Black 9th and 10th Cavalry Regiments and the 24th and 25th Infantry Regiments — were among the most effective and decorated units in the post-Civil War Army. They served continuously on the frontier from 1866 through the 1890s, building roads, mapping territory, escorting settlers, protecting stagecoach routes, and fighting in virtually every significant military engagement in the West. They had the lowest desertion rate and the highest reenlistment rate of any units in the Army. Eighteen Buffalo Soldiers received the Medal of Honor.

They were also, by every measure, treated as second-class soldiers. They received the worst horses, the oldest equipment, the most remote and inhospitable postings. They were commanded exclusively by white officers, many of whom considered the assignment a career punishment. They were refused service in the towns they were stationed to protect. And in the mythology of the West that Hollywood would construct beginning in the 1930s, they simply did not exist. John Ford, the director who more than any other individual shaped the cinematic mythology of the American West, made dozens of Westerns featuring the U.S. Cavalry. Not one included a Black soldier.

The All-Black Towns

The Black presence in the West was not limited to cowboys and soldiers. In the decades following Reconstruction, thousands of Black families migrated to the frontier to establish communities where they could live free of the racial terrorism that had engulfed the South. Oklahoma Territory alone was home to more than fifty all-Black towns — more than any other state or territory in the nation. Boley, founded in 1903, was once the largest all-Black town in the United States, with a population of more than four thousand, two banks, a newspaper, a cotton gin, and a college. Langston, founded in 1890, was home to the Colored Agricultural and Normal University, now Langston University. Taft, Clearview, Rentiesville, Red Bird — these were not settlements clinging to survival. They were organized, self-governing communities with elected officials, school systems, commercial districts, and civic institutions.

Booker T. Washington visited Boley in 1905 and wrote about it for The Outlook magazine, describing a community that embodied his vision of Black self-determination through economic development. The existence of these towns contradicts the narrative that Black Americans were passive recipients of white settlement patterns, following rather than leading the expansion westward. They went to the frontier for the same reason everyone else did: because the frontier represented the possibility of a life defined by what you could build rather than what you had been denied.

How Hollywood Erased Them

The erasure was not accidental. It was industrial. Between 1930 and 1980, Hollywood produced an estimated five thousand Western films and television episodes. The number that featured a Black cowboy in a lead or significant supporting role can be counted on one hand. This was not because audiences would not have accepted Black cowboys — the popularity of Herb Jeffries, the “Bronze Buckaroo” who starred in a series of all-Black Westerns in the late 1930s, demonstrated that there was an audience for these stories. It was because the Western genre served a specific mythological function in American culture, and that function required whiteness.

The Western was the creation myth of modern America. It told Americans that their nation was built by rugged white individuals who tamed a wilderness through courage, self-reliance, and moral clarity. This myth served multiple purposes: it justified westward expansion and the displacement of Indigenous peoples, it reinforced the idea of American exceptionalism, and it provided a narrative of national identity that was racially exclusive by design. Including Black cowboys in this narrative would have complicated the myth in ways that Hollywood’s commercial interests and America’s racial politics could not accommodate. A frontier built in part by Black labor, defended in part by Black soldiers, and settled in part by Black communities did not serve the story that white America wanted to tell itself about how the nation was made.

The psychological cost of this erasure is difficult to quantify but impossible to overstate. For generations, Black children grew up watching Western movies and television shows in which the frontier — the quintessential American narrative of self-determination and courage — was presented as exclusively white territory. The message, absorbed before it could be consciously processed, was that Black people had no place in the foundational story of the nation. That self-reliance, independence, and frontier courage were white characteristics. That Black history began with slavery and proceeded through victimhood, with no chapter in which Black Americans were the agents of their own destiny, riding into the unknown on their own terms.

The Revival

The correction is underway, though it comes a century late. Black rodeo culture, which has existed continuously since the nineteenth century in a parallel tradition invisible to mainstream media, has begun to receive recognition. The Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo, founded in 1984, is the only touring Black rodeo in the country, and its audiences are growing. In the Mississippi Delta, in Texas, in Oklahoma, and across the rural South, Black cowboy culture persists — trail rides that draw thousands of participants, riding clubs that have operated for generations, a living tradition that survived its own erasure.

Contemporary artists and filmmakers are beginning to reclaim the narrative. The work of photographers like Rory Doyle, whose “Delta Hill Riders” series documents Black cowboy culture in the Mississippi Delta, has brought visibility to a tradition that mainstream media pretended did not exist. Films and television series featuring Black cowboys are emerging, though they remain a fraction of the genre’s output. Academic scholarship has expanded dramatically since Katz and Durham’s pioneering work, with a growing body of research documenting the full scope of Black participation in the westward expansion.

But the damage of the erasure is not undone by its correction. The narrative that the West was white has been absorbed into the American unconscious for a century. It has shaped how Black Americans see themselves in relation to the national story, how white Americans understand the origins of their nation, and how the qualities associated with the frontier — independence, self-reliance, courage, the willingness to build something from nothing in hostile territory — have been culturally coded as white attributes rather than human ones.

Why This History Matters Now

The history of Black cowboys matters because it disrupts the most damaging narrative in American racial discourse: the idea that Black people are, have always been, and are naturally suited to be dependent. The frontier narrative is a narrative of agency, of self-determination, of people who looked at an impossible landscape and decided to cross it anyway. One in four of those people was Black. They rode the same trails, worked the same cattle, faced the same dangers, and built the same towns. They were not victims waiting for rescue. They were not dependents seeking charity. They were Americans doing what Americans do — going somewhere new and building something there.

This is the history that was stolen, and it was stolen because it is powerful. A people who know that their ancestors rode the frontier, built towns, enforced the law, and invented rodeo events carry themselves differently than a people who have been taught that their history is a long catalog of suffering inflicted by others. Both histories are true. The suffering was real. But so was the riding, and the building, and the independence, and the courage. The dime novels erased it. Hollywood erased it. The textbooks erased it. But the trail rides continue, the riding clubs persist, and the names — Nat Love, Bass Reeves, Bill Pickett, Mary Fields — are still there in the historical record, waiting to be spoken aloud, waiting to take their place in the story of how this country was actually made, which is to say: by everyone who was brave enough to go west and strong enough to survive once they got there, regardless of the color of their skin and despite every effort to pretend they were never there at all.