Black cowboys

For other uses, see Black Cowboys.
A portrait of a cowboy seated with his hands on his hips wearing a hat, vest, long-sleeve shirt, leather cuffs on his wrists, fur chaps and pants. His gun holster is in his lap and he has a scarf tied around his neck. He is looking into the camera.
A Black cowboy from the early 1900s

Black cowboys in the American West accounted for up to an estimated 25% of cowboys "who went up the trail" from the 1860s to 1880s and substantial but unknown percentage[contradictory] in the rest of the ranching industry,[1][2] estimated to be at least 5,000 workers according to recent research.[3] [better source needed]

Typically former slaves or born into the families of former slaves, many Black men had skills in cattle handling and headed West at the end of the Civil War.[4] Though the industry generally treated Black men equally to White men in terms of pay and responsibilities, discrimination persisted, though to a lesser extent than in other industries of the time; historian Kenneth Porter (1994) describes the employment composition of trail parties as:

"...A trailherd outfit of about a dozen men would on the average consist of seven or eight Whites, including the trail boss, three Negroes—one of whom was probably the cook, while another might be the horse wrangler, and the third would simply be a trail hand—and one or two Mexicans; if a Negro was not the wrangler, then a Mexican often was. Needless to say, this is not the typical trail outfit of popular literature and drama...Negroes occupied all the positions among cattle-industry employees, from the usually lowly wrangler through ordinary hand to top hand and lofty cook. But they were almost never, except in the highly infrequent case of an all-Negro outfit, to be found as ranch or trail boss."

  1. ^ Porter, Kenneth (1994). "African Americans in the Cattle Industry, 1860s–1880s". Peoples of Color in the American West ([Nachdr.] ed.). Lexington, Mass. [u.a.]: Heath. pp. 158–167. ISBN 0669279137.
  2. ^ "Deadwood Dick and the Black Cowboys". The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education (22): 30. 1998. doi:10.2307/2998819. JSTOR 3650843.
  3. ^ Glasrud, Bruce A.; Searles, Michael N. (2016). Black Cowboys in the American West: On the Range, On the Stage, Behind the Badge. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. ISBN 9780806154060.
  4. ^ Cite error: The named reference Goldstein-Shirley was invoked but never defined (see the help page).