The term "Cowboy" has undergone many metamorphoses in American culture, yet many people are in the dark about the true nature of its origins and evolution as well as its relationship to the history of African-Americans. It is no coincidence that "Cowboy" is also taken as an adjective for "reckless" and developed in the early 1900's. The term "Cowboy" is sometimes used today in a derogatory sense to describe someone who is reckless or ignores potential risks, irresponsible or who heedlessly handles a sensitive or dangerous task. TIME Magazine referred to President George W. Bush's foreign policy as "Cowboy diplomacy," and Bush has been described in the press, particularly in Europe, as a "cowboy".

In the British Isles, Australia and New Zealand, "cowboy" is still used as an adjective when applied to tradesmen whose work is of shoddy and questionable value, e.g., "a cowboy plumber". Similar usage is seen in the United States to describe someone in the skilled trades who operates without proper training or licenses. In the eastern United States, "cowboy" as a noun is sometimes used to describe a fast or careless driver on the highway.

 

 

However, the fact remains that the role of Black people has been almost totally scrubbed and removed from the history books as much of our contributions usually are. To efficiently dominate a people, you must first deny, denigrate, demean and destroy their contributions to society. Then they are at your mercy. That is why most Africans today are either Christian or Muslim.

The Western Cowboy lore evinces notions of brash, derring-do romanticisms that tend to err in fact. The irony behind the word “cowboy,” is that it was used to negatively describe Black “cowhands” but now serves as a universal depiction of the bootstrapping, gun-toting white males associated with western culture. This is evidenced in popular films including, but not limited to, The Magnificent Seven (1960) and John Wayne movies. The most common image of the cowboy is a gun-toting, boot-wearing, white man like John Wayne or Clint Eastwood, but the Hollywood portrayal of the Wild West is a whitewashed version of the reality. It is thought that, on some Texas trails, about a third of cowboys were black.

"Black cowboys often had the job of breaking horses that hadn't been ridden much," says Mike Searles, a retired professor of history at Augusta State University. 

I wish to take three positions about the subject. 

My first position is that I believe the word "Cowboy" originates from the English language. My second position is that there is no such thing as a first ethnic Cowboy in the American West. The American West Cowboy is a product of a cultural synthesis. My third position is in order to understand the American West Cowboy one must understand the history of the cattle industry in the Americas, which I plan to touch on briefly.

Etymologists seem to agree that the word "Cowboy" has its origins in the English language. The English language was impacted by Rome and France at some time in their history, but etymologists trace the word 'cow' to its English-Germanic roots, the Middle English 'cou', the Old English 'cu' and the Old High German 'kuo'. 

The same source that I am using for this phase of the discussion claims that the word "Boy" originated in the 1200's, also English, and meant a male servant, not a male child. 

The word "Cowboy" exists in medieval Ireland according to a PBS article (www.pbs.org/speak/words/trackthatword), which also mentions the tracking of the word to the American Revolution and referred to any Tory, or American colonist who supported the British Crown by stealing cattle from the colonial rebels. This is where we began with the evolution of the word into American English. 

As for the evolution of the word "Cowboy' into the history of American slaves, there is every reason to believe that the word became the prevalent address for cattle industry laborers who were subjugated or deemed servants of English cattle owners.

Writers mention "Slave Cowboys" in their studies of South Carolina and Appalachian cattle industries. They also mention slave cattle rustlers working under the direction of their masters. There is plenty of material which deals with the issue of non-servant class, free cattle laborers refusing to be called "cowboy" during American colonialism, but I do want to point out that not all underclass laborers in the colonial cattle industry were African-American slaves, some were Indian and some were indentured Whites. 

So regarding my first point, African-American slaves who worked with cattle inherited the title "cowboy" from the English language, and though the word did not arise as a result of American slavery, it certainly impacted the black race directly as a result of a prevailing tendency to assign the most degrading, denigrating terms of address towards Black people. 

Contrary to what Hollywood tells us, the word was not created in Texas. Buckaroo is the transliterated word for Vaquero, not "cowboy" and finally, it is not a pidgin word from the numerous African languages that came to America. Africans from cattle cultures like the Fulani had there own words for people who worked with cows.

Diverse herding cultures existed on nearly every continent before Columbus brought the first European cattle to the Caribbean, and I have to leave the door open about that since the possibility of Nordic cattle being brought by the Vikings might exist earlier than Columbus. I also am including herding and hunting techniques of Native Americans and the Buffalo as a pre-American cowboy cultural attribute. Both branding cattle and bullfighting finds its Spanish roots in Africa, but the issue is how this multi-cultural synthesis created the American term "cowboy". 

In the colonial Americas, this synthesis begins well before the American West Frontier collided with the Mexican North Frontier, it occurred during the colonial periods of both New Spain and the emergence of the English Colonies. Cattle from New England went to Spain and the West Indies. The principal cattle markets of South Carolina by 1682 were the Bahamas, Jamaica, and Barbados. British troops and Creek Indians regularly stole Spanish cattle from Florida in 1704 and added the stock to the South Carolina cattle industry. New Spain exported cattle to French New Orleans by 1750. California Mission cattle products were shipped around the horn of South America to New England before Mexican Independence in 1821. All these exchanges occurred before slave-owning American settlers and Texas Hispanic citizens joined in a revolt against the Mexican government in Texas in 1835.

Texas seems to be the gradient factor between the Anglo-American colonial cattle culture and the Spanish-American colonial cattle culture, although Louisiana was equally important. It is reasonable to recognize Texas as a beginning for the American Western Cowboy, especially when we address the issue of the American slave cowboy, but other avenues of cultural exchange were activated after the Mexican Revolution, including the Santa Fe Trail trade, Irish refugees arriving from the Potato Famine, Prussian refugees fleeing Otto von Bismark's consolidation of the German state and contact with Native-American horse cultures.

One of the things that made the synthesized American West cowboy culturally unique from Old World or Colonial cattle herders was the use of tools. While Vaquero's preferred the reata and Americans preferred a gun, the American West Cowboy learned to use both. This is an excerpt about a Black Cowboy named John Ware who ended up as a Canadian Cowboy via the Carolinas, Texas and Idaho:

John Ware, Canada's Legendary Cowboy (1845-1905):

".....to keep these cattle going the right direction, it was important that the lead cattle head in the direction the cattlemen wanted them to go. It isn't quite like herding cats, but in a wide open land, it is not an easy task. One tactic was to fire a shot across the snoot of the lead cattle to make it turn. If that didn't work, the cowboy had to run in front of the cattle and force it to turn, a very dangerous and life threatening act if the steer didn't behave. But this was the sort of things that John Ware did during his drive north."
(www.glennjlea.ca/free/articles/JohnWare.htm)

Another unique marker of the American West Cowboy was language and music. It was the time when Alpine yodeling met the African banjo and the Spanish guitar and the grandchild of the Italian violin, the fiddle. A time when Irish ballads met "The Yellow Rose Of Texas," a song that musicologists believe was written about an African-American woman and may have been written by an African-American soldier from Tennessee: 

"...The folksong's lyrics [see Lyrics] tell of a black American (presumably a soldier) who left his sweetheart (a "yellow rose") and yearns to return to her side. "Yellow" was a term given to Americans of mixed race in those days....most commonly half-breeds or mulattos. And "Rose" was a popular feminine nineteenth century name; frequently used in songs and poems as a symbolic glorification of young womanhood. [Turner]" 

- In Search of the "Yellow Rose of Texas" by Mark Whitelaw.
(http://www.dfw.net/~amaranth/yellow.htm ) 

Finally, I'll close this section with an excerpt regarding Cowboy Western music:
'How Cowboy Songs Got Started' by Tom Faigin:
"... First of all, these songs were group products or projects, not the work of one individual. The melodies were borrowed from older melodies and modified to fit the needs of the cowboys in their daily struggles. English and Scottish ballads, Irish reels, Negro spirituals, German art songs and sentimental popular songs of the day were all grist for the cowboy "song mill". "
(www.jsfmusic.com/Uncle_Tom/Tom_Article011.html)

Finally, some colonists were known to base their wealth on their livestock, which often included slaves. New England Colonists traded cattle and other products of the earth to the West Indies, Spain and England in exchange for manufactured good and sugar products. South Carolina was known as the heart of the British-American cattle industry by 1682; their principal markets were the Bahamas, Jamaica and Barbados. South Jersey Colonists grazed cattle in salt marshes and sold to a domestic market in Philadelphia and New York. Some Colonists raised cattle just for leather, others for beef, milk products and tallow for candle making and soap. 

Taxes were sometimes collected in livestock, and governments constantly complained about livestock taxes being paid with lean animals. Early Colonists were not known as good agriculturalists, they were business people, hypocritically pious people and government people. Recruitments were solicited back to Europe for people who knew agriculture, and they soon came, but in the mean time, Native Americans were employed either through slavery or cooperation to assist the colonist, and soon Africans with known skills, both free and enslaved, arrived to complete the Colonial cattle industry labor force. After the American Revolution, the cattle industry can be identified with such notables as George Washington, who owned Red Devon, milking cattle and owned a plantation largely worked with slave labor, though Washington was reported to have purchased and traded things from his slaves.

The Colonial Spanish cattle industry was huge and directly tied to Spain and the Catholic Missions. The Spanish had diverse economics in the new world, mining, sugar and cattle and trade that reached the four corners of the earth. In the arid region of their Northern frontier, what we know now as California, New Mexico, Arizona and Texas, cattle grazing was sometimes the sole economic prospect until dams and irrigation techniques were developed. Spanish cattle leather often returned to the Spanish colonies as fine leatherworks such as chests, clothing and furniture. Spanish money was the earliest form of money in the Americas, including the English Colonies, but leather hides had become a form of currency in some regions such as California, with some traders calling the hides, "California Dollars." 

The first original labor source for the Spanish Colonial cattle industry were Native-Americans, and in many regions, such as the California Missions, it remained that way until the American (U.S.) cattle industry supplanted it. The Indian labor force was replaced by slave labor as well as vaqueros of African and European descent as well as mixed race Mestizos after the advent of disease and repression nearly obliterated the indigenous population. As with the English colonial cattle labor force, the Spanish colonial cattle labor force were not of a class of wealth, their pay was meager and in the case of the Mission Indian Vaqueros, compensation was equal to the unpaid slaves of the English Colonies. 

In order to fairly demonstrate that neither the American Cowboy nor Mexican Vaquero enjoyed a glamorous economic status, I include this excerpt regarding the Vaquero: 

'The Ranch in Mexico' by Joe S. Graham:
"...Slowly, ranching haciendas began to replace the government as focal points of social, economic, and political life. As the hacendados (ranch owners) became more powerful, the system took a step backward toward the feudal system of Europe, since the hacendados basically ruled over everyone within the boundaries of the hacienda. Haciendados attempted to cut expenses by lowering wages for the vaqueros and enforcing a system of credit at the hacienda store, through which many vaqueros became "bonded" servants to the hacienda. Some vaqueros were even born into a life of debt incurred by their fathers, and many went through life never seeing their wages, which were simply credited to their store accounts." 

In later years, "Mail-Order Cowboy" was used as a derogatory term used to chide tenderfoot, urban "cowboys" who arrived from the East all decked out in fancy but hardly practical Western garb.

In Conclusion, cattle and horse ownership has always been associated with wealth and prestige, even among the most ancient of our herding cultures. I remember a saying from a freed Slave narrative I read once which stated that a Negro wasn't really free until he owned a horse. With ideas of freedom and wealth associated with the ownership of horses and cattle, it should not be a surprise that the American West Cowboy has been romanticized. 

What is unique about this romanticism is that the owners were not the ones being glamorized but the lowly laborer....albeit a fact that was oft-hidden from the general public. Slave cowboys were not glamorized, nothing in slave status was. Vaqueros of the Dons were not glamorized, they were also known as peons.

American Cowboys explain in their narratives how un-romantic their jobs were. The Romanticism of the American Cowboy literature began with dime store novels of cowboys meant to edify the working class, Wild West shows and rodeos like the 'Millers 101' Ranch show, or Buffalo Bill Cody's "Wild West Show," and finally the John Wayne-themed Hollywood false narratives. 

Spanish cattle culture romanticism took on an entirely different route with Matadors and bear and bullfights and horse races put together to see who could snatch a buried chicken by the head from the ground. What I believe may bother most African-Americans about this topic is the whitewashing of their roles as the oft-derided cowboy which started the trend and how it was whitewashed to highlight the white man as a hero, and TOnto, his sidekick. People of African descent were edited out of the history, and this was done as a deliberate artistic prerogative. It is also equally unfortunate that some Hispanic authors have decided to minimize the role that people of African descent had in the evolution of the vaquero and caballero in Spanish America.

"Being a black cowboy was hard work," muses 88-year-old Cleveland Walters, who lives just outside the town of Liberty, Texas. "I hate to think of the racism I went through. When it was branding time, they'd put 20 cows in the pen and I was the one who had to catch them and hold them down. The brander was white, so in other words all the hard, dirty work was done by the black cowboys."

While watching Westerns through the decades one would never see any black actors in major cowboy roles. Not only did Hollywood ignore black cowboys, it plundered their real stories as material for some of its films.

The Lone Ranger, for example, is believed to have been inspired by Bass Reeves, one of the first black lawmen, who used disguises, had a Native -merican sidekick and went through his whole career without being shot.

The 1956 John Ford film "The Searchers", based on Alan Le May's novel, was partly inspired by the exploits of Brit Johnson, a black cowboy whose wife and children were captured by the Comanches in 1865. In the film, John Wayne plays as a Civil War veteran who spends years looking for his niece who has been abducted by Indians. In recent years, after much criticism, black characters have appeared in Westerns such as Posse, Unforgiven and Django Unchained.

If something is not in the popular imagination, it does not exist, and this is why did Hollywood chose to so misrepresent the true racial diversity of the West.

The American West is often considered the birthplace of America, where Americans were distinct from their European counterparts. The West was where white men were able to show their courage. But if a black man could be heroic and have all the attributes that you give to the best qualities in men, then how was it possible to treat a black man as subservient or as a non-person?

When you can answer that, you will have unravelled the true nature of, and possibly discerned the cure to, the cancer within America.