Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Black Cowboys

Episode Date: September 16, 2020

Most people don't realize that around a quarter of the cowboys found in the Old West during the golden age cattle driving were African American. Let's meet some of them, shall we? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck. Who knows where Jerry is, but this is short stuff,

so it doesn't matter, because we can handle it ourselves with a little assist by our friend, Dave Coustan. Yeah, I don't think we don't shout out Dave enough. Not nearly enough. As a matter of fact, let's just make this episode just talking about how great Dave is. Right, the original Black Cowboy. That's right, but totally wrong.

But it was a decent attempt at a segway. Yeah, because we all know the original Black Cowboy was Sheriff Bart in Blazing Saddles. Oh yeah, yeah, I forgot about that movie. Is that a good one? I mean, it's a classic, it couldn't be made today. Sure. But, you know, written by Mel Brooks

and the great Richard Pryor, and I think there was one other co-writer. But yeah, they played that for comedy in that movie, but as it turns out, there were a lot of Black Cowboys in the United States, and you just don't see a bunch of movies and TV shows where they're represented, shock, shock. But they were, I mean, there are some statistics

that say 25% or more of all Cowboys after the Civil War in the Wild West were these Black men out there doing cowboy stuff, working hard, roping cattle, doing all the things that you see in the movies. Yeah, like the idea from what I can tell from the research is that the popular conception of Cowboys and Cowboy life and what Cowboys did is fairly accurate,

but the race of them is what was off. That just the fact that Black people were not at all represented among Cowboys in the popularization of Cowboy life back East, is just that's the historical misunderstanding and that apparently even before the Civil War, most Black Cowboys, according to one historian of the American West, most of them,

most of the Cowboys were Black, in that it was a job that was open to enslaved people, basically, and that if you were white, you didn't want to be known as a cowboy, that job was potentially beneath you or whatever. Even though it was all about Bronco Bustin and herding cattle and lassoing and stuff like that,

all the stuff we think of with Cowboys today, but that transition between it being from something that was like beneath a white guy out West to something that was a coveted title among white guys was when back East people started to hear about Cowboys and say, that's cool, what a cool life. And then all of a sudden white guys were like, oh, actually, I'm a cowboy now, you can count me in.

Yeah, I mean, I think that that name, at least according to this historian is racist in nature, because the white workers wanted to be called Cowpunches or Cowhands and the Black men were called Cowboys. And like you said, once Lore hit back East, they jumped on that Cowboy train because I guess that word took and it sounded cool. Yeah, the thing is, I went and tried to corroborate

that elsewhere because it makes sense if you take it from that standpoint that, oh, actually Cowboy actually has like a denigrating origin, but I did not see that anywhere else. And I couldn't find the difference between a Cowhand and a Cowboy. They are completely interchangeable from what I can tell definition-wise.

But I don't know, maybe that just that etymology got lost to history, you know? Well, Larry Kallies runs the Black Cowboy Museum in Texas in Rosenberg. And we want to credit him with saying that since he's where we got it. Yep, here Larry, here's the limb, let's go out on it. So the idea of Black Cowboys and Cowboys in general

really kind of came out of this migration of Southerners especially, Southern whites moving out west to Texas for the chance for cheap land, wide open spaces, the promise of a new chance for a fortune because the South had really become industrialized as far as agrarianism is concerned. And Texas had a lot of opportunity, especially if you were willing to push Spanish settlers

and indigenous people from Mexico off of their land, you could really make a name for yourself in Texas. And a lot of those white settlers brought enslaved people with them. And they were the earliest Black Cowboys out there. Yeah, because what happened was, you know, you're in Texas, you get roped into the Confederacy and then these white people who moved out west

go back east to fight in the Civil War, they left the people that they enslaved behind to keep the ranch going basically. And that was sort of the beginning of the Black Cowboy movement. It really was, what's interesting is that it was triggered by the Civil War, that the Civil War created that kind of niche and need,

sorry, that need for Cowboys of all stripes, but that typically fell to African-Americans who were doing this work while the whites were off fighting the war. And then when the war was over, when the white Confederates came back to Texas, they were like, hey, I don't know if you heard or not, but we're free now, so you have to pay us for this work.

And because a lot of herds had been broken up and lost, there was a lot of work to be done getting these herds back in order and getting Texas back up and running, economy-wise, especially with cattle herding. Yeah, so maybe let's take a break and we'll talk about some of the more famous of these Black Cowboys right after this.

We'll see you in a bit. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.

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So if you look at the history books and TV shows and movies, you hear a lot about Wild Bill Hickok and Annie Oakley and all these sort of legendary Wild West figures. You don't hear as much about the black cowboys who were also legendary figures just in the same way. Like they would, you know, some of them were bad guys who would shoot up a saloon and have a gunfight in the middle of the street at high noon.

Many of them obviously were just regular cowboys who did hard work day and night, wrestling cattle. Some of them also, Chuck or even Lawman too. There was a guy named Bass Reeves who was the first African American Marshall, US Marshall, west of the Mississippi. And he had a 32 year career and apparently was so morally unimpeachable

that some people insist he was the model for the Lone Ranger. I know, isn't that crazy? It is. And I have to tell you, I grew up on the Lone Ranger, the 1980 two or three movie. Oh, the movie, okay. Yeah, yeah.

It informed my childhood. I also watched the TV show too. And I had like a play set and everything. But I was a big time into the Lone Ranger. I watched that movie within the last couple of months. It is one of the most boring movies I have ever seen in my life. It doesn't hold up, does it?

I was like, my parents must have been like, what is wrong with this kid? This movie is just like watching paint dry. There's like five parts that are interesting. And the rest is like just slowly stringing together those parts, it's really weird. And the chemistry is like baking soda and more baking soda.

Like nobody has any chemistry in this. It means that there's nothing happening. There's no reaction. I tell you what I love though about that movie is that color blue of his outfit. It's the star of the movie basically. Yeah, and the color of his hat too, because it was white, but it wasn't stark white.

It was sort of this creamy white. Yeah, he had a tinge of badness to him maybe when needing, but I guess not. Another famous black cowboy from back in the day was a man named Bose Eichard. He is on the Hall of Fame at the National Multicultural Western Heritage Museum and Hall of Fame.

God bless the people who founded that. I know. And he was the right hand man to one Colonel Charles Goodnight. He was a big, super successful cattle man in Texas. And apparently, if you've ever read or seen Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry's sort of classic Western. I never have.

The character of Joshua Dietz was based on him, played by none other than Danny Glover, who was not too old for that S. Who is what? He was not too old for that S. That's the big line from the other movie. I'm getting too old for this S. Oh man, that was a great joke.

I'm sorry I had you repeat it. That's all right. So there's another one named Bill Pickett, who was a very famous rodeo guy. He was one of the first African American rodeo men, I guess. And he invented the sport of steer wrestling, which is where you ride up alongside a steer and grab him by the horns and drag him to the ground.

A steer. My least favorite. It's really awful, especially when you understand what he came up with, it was just called bulldogging, where it was a technique that he would overwhelm the steer with pain by biting its lip. And he was inspired by watching dogs herd cattle. So he tried it himself. He's like, this really works.

But he was a genuine trailblazer in the rodeo world. And despite the fact that he was barred from competing in a lot of rodeos, even though he was among the best, that rodeos were segregated for a very long time. And if you were an African American rodeo cowboy, you had to compete either late at night or early in the morning before the actual rodeo started, or else you might have your own rodeo altogether.

I mentioned outlaws. There was a man named Isom or Isom Dart. He was an enslaved person who went the other way and he was a horse thief. Like so many other horse thieves, he would steal horses and cattle in Mexico, drive them across that big old Rio Grande River, sell them off in Texas.

And like so many outlaws, he was shot down by a hired gun, in this case, Tom Horn. And I'm thinking of movies. I think there have been a couple of movies where they did represent these black cowboys, but it always seemed like these movies were sort of a, not a trick, but just kind of like stunt casting. Like, ooh, we're gonna make a movie with black cowboys.

How different instead of, well, this is just a movie like any other Western, because this is how it was. Exactly, and I'm sure that they were all just left out of the history books because of some oversight, but I'm glad we're here correcting it today. Well, we're trying our best. There's also, we would be very terribly remissed

if we didn't mention the most famous black cowboy of all time, one Nate Love, also known as Deadwood Dick. I think it's Nat. No, it's not. I specifically saw it in a couple of places and we verified it. Oh, really? Yeah, his name was, he was born Nathaniel. And I guess they just didn't feel like adding the E,

which is significant because he was taught to read and write despite being born enslaved. His father taught him to read and write. So he was educated enough that he actually wrote his own autobiography in 1907. I should have just kept it as 1907. That sounded kind of old-timey. But Chuck, I think you need to read everybody the title

and note that there is not a single colon found in it. Yeah, it's Life and Adventures of Nat Love and it's spelled N-A-T in the autobiography title. I swear it's Nate. Well, I'm looking at the book cover. I know, I'm telling you, it's pronounced Nate. Okay, but there is no E, I just wanna point out to people. Life and Adventures of Blank Love,

better known in the cattle country as Deadwood Dick by himself, colon. A true history of slavery days, life on the great cattle ranges, and on the plains of the wild and woolly west based on facts and personal experiences by the author. There is a colon, I thought that was a semi-colon. There's always a colon, isn't there?

It seems to be. But he was like you were describing, like he would get in shootouts and he was kind of known as an abandoner and outlaw in some circles. But from what I can tell, he was just a legitimate, bona fide cowboy and he led a cowboy life like any other cowboy would.

Fantastic. It really is fantastic. Very, very big self-promoter like so many of those cowboys back then. Yeah, for sure. They say that they're not entirely certain where fact departs from fiction in his autobiography, but it's apparently a heck of a read.

So go check it out. And I guess I said check it out, which means that short stuff is out, huh? It's out. Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app.

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