There are a number of problems with the way American history is portrayed in television and film, and in the history books and classrooms that I grew up with. I spent most of my childhood and teenage years in Colorado and New Mexico, landscapes that are associated the world over with the Old West. But even growing up on a cattle ranch, surrounded by some of the strongest Indigenous nations in the continental USA, surrounded by Chicano/LatinX people who had roots dating back five hundred years, I never knew how much the real history of the Old West was Black history until I was in my late 30’s.
And that’s because every form of media I had consumed up until that point, from my school textbooks to the kid’s shows that I watched after school, was LYING TO MY DAMN FACE. To put it bluntly, there is no genre of popular fiction that is more white-washed—and I invoke every possible meaning of this term—than the Western. In novels and magazines, on radio and television, and especially on the Silver Screen, the Old West that our media has constructed is a lie—a thoroughly embarrassing lie, and one that we still have not done enough to correct.
One of the truths that the whole world must face, particularly Americans, is that Old West or the slightly-more-accurately named “Wild West” was a terrifying place to be. Rambling over the Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River was a multi-racial population of deeply traumatized, often violent people. In fact, I would surmise that the population of the Old West might actually represent the highest concentration of PTSD victims per capita in the history of the world.
All in one place and time, you had the veterans from both the winning and losing sides of the Civil War, which remains to this day the deadliest war in American history. You had the survivors of chattel slavery, an inconceivably brutal system which made rape, torture, mutilation, murder and the loss of family members into commonplace, mundane everyday experiences for Black men, women and children. And these people were moving into lands that had been occupied for centuries or millennia by Indigenous Nations that were now desperate and despairing, facing an ongoing onslaught of invasion, displacement, starvation, disease, and genocidal war.
All of this was happening with very limited oversight from civilian authorities. The fictional media stemming from this period tends to make “lawlessness” or “wildness” into some kind of romantic adventure. But the Great PTSD Theme Park of the Old West was a hell of a lot more scary and bloody than most of the “Western” genre of the 20th century was willing to admit.
It was also a hell of a lot more Black.
If you think back to every show or movie you’ve ever seen about historical cowboys, I need you to visualize the cast as they appeared on screen. And once you have that line-up in your head—a line-up that I guarantee is 99.99% White people, especially given that most of the Asian and Indigenous American characters were White people wearing some kind of make-up—I need you to take all of those cowboys, and imagine that 20 to 25% of them were Black.
Why? Because that is the actual historical ratio of Black men versus men of other ethnicities in that role. In fact, the very term “cowboy”, which has come to apply to every Western-style rider who drives cattle on horseback, was actually first directed solely at Black men—White men who drove cattle on horseback were called “cowhands”, and Chicano men who drive cattle on horseback are “vaqueros”. “Cowboy” comes from the hateful pejorative “boy” of the antebellum South—a word used to imply that a Black man was always less than a man.
In addition to Black cowboys (and miners and prospectors), there was a massive Exodus of Black settlers to the West. An entire millenarian movement called the Exodusters rose up, as Black people in several Southern states fled the violence inflicted on them by the sore losers of the Civil War and the White Supremacist movements that rose out of their humiliation. In addition to claiming some farmland in Kansas and vastly increasing the Black population in St Louis, there were entire Black towns being built—nearly fifty of them throughout the Old West, nearly half in Texas alone.
None of this reality is depicted in most of the “historical fiction” of the Western genre. But of all the white-washing of the West that happens in Westerns, the most egregious example I can think of is the Lone Ranger—which began in 1933 as a radio serial and quickly became a media franchise that spanned books, comics, a highly successful television show which ran from 1949 to 1957, and a number of movies.
I’m not going to waste a lot of time describing the White hero of the Lone Ranger franchise. Re-runs of the show were still common when I grew up in the 1970’s, and I could probably turn to any American of my generation and say “Hiyo, Silver!” and receive the response “Away!” The line is burned into our brains like the call and response of a hymn.
I grew up on the masked law man roaming the West bringing bad men to justice, riding on his white stallion Silver and accompanied by his Indigenous best friend, Tonto. If Superman and Wonder Woman were the demi-gods of the 20th century American pantheon, the Long Ranger was our heroic paladin. He embodied a moral code, stated thus by radio and comics writer Fran Striker:
“I believe that to have a friend, a man must be one.
That all men are created equal and that everyone has within himself the power to make this a better world.
That God put the firewood there but that every man must gather and light it himself.
In being prepared physically, mentally, and morally to fight when necessary for what is right.
That a man should make the most of what equipment he has.
That 'this government, of the people, by the people and for the people' shall live always.
That men should live by the rule of what is best for the greatest number.
That sooner or later... somewhere...somehow... we must settle with the world and make payment for what we have taken.
That all things change but truth, and that truth alone, lives on forever.
In my Creator, my country, my fellow man.”
The absurd truth of the real Old West is that a man very much like the Lone Ranger DID actually exist. He was an imposing lawman who stood 6’2”, dressed well, kept his boots shining, and always rode a white stallion. He was a crack shot with a Winchester rifle and wore two Colt pistols on his belt, the butts facing forward for a smooth ambidextrous draw. He was a seasoned veteran of Indian Country who spent years living among the Indigenous people of the region before he became a deputy, and he spoke several Native American languages fluently. When he was on a case, he traveled with a cook, a wagon, and a Native American posseman.
His name was Bass Reeves. Born to slave parents in Arkansas, taken by slave owners to Texas, he parted ways with the White men who had taken him to the battlefield of the Civil War and fled into Indian Country, taking refuge with the Seminole, Cherokee and Creek people. After the Emancipation Proclamation he married and settled in Arkansas, a successful farmer with ten children. He served occasionally as a scout and guide to U.S. Deputy Marshals heading into the Indian Territory from 1863 to 1875. That was when he was recruited as the first Black Deputy Marshal under Judge Isaac Parker, charged with “cleaning up” the Indian Territory—a landscape then riddled with thieves and murderers, because for years there had been no Federal jurisdiction or law.
For decades, Bass Reeves served the law with heroic skill. The range he covered was 75,000 square miles of territory, and over the course of his 35-year career he brought over 3,000 outlaws to justice. He shot 14 men in during his service, but in his own words he “never shot a man when it was not necessary for him to do so in the discharge of his duty to save his own life”.
Reeves had a stunning combination of creativity and steadfastness in the performance of that duty. He was known to use disguises and subterfuge to track some outlaws down, he was the victor in more than one gun fight, and he was so iron-willed in service that he was willing to track down and arrest his own son, when the judge handed him a warrant for his daughter-in-law’s murder.
He died in 1910 and was buried in Muskogee, Oklahoma. And before you ask, there’s no smoking gun or concrete proof that reading about his exploits inspired the writer of the Lone Ranger, Fran Striker, when he developed the character throughout the 1930’s. But people who say they have “debunked the claim” that Reeves inspired the character by waving around a letter between the writer and producer of the show where they agreed to make the Ranger a “Tom Mix type” (a popular White actor in the Westerns of the early 20th century) are just being fools.
Because all things change but truth, and truth alone lives on forever.
And the truth is that Lone Ranger was Black.
Now somebody make THAT movie.
Fun Resources for Readers of All Ages
Black Heroes of the Wild West, by James Otis Smith
Legends of America: Bass Reeves
Was The Real Lone Ranger a Black Man? History.com
Black on the Range: African-American Cowboys in the 19th Century
Wikipedia: List of Freedman Towns
History is about the study of authentic written communications, books and letters and artifacts. All that we have of the past is smoke and dross except for this. There is no thus such thing as black history for the simple reason that, with rare exceptions like Dumas, old-tymee black folk were not the ones to actually write or produce or save and authenticate the available evidence. It was all done by white Anglo american journalists writing slock copy and fiction that sold for pennies. The subjects left little first hand material because they were essentially incapable of writing or reading and they did not know how to take photographs or develop film or file land claims. So we have only second hand material that has been ‘edited’ by ‘white people’. This logically implies that the category ‘white people’, equals the category ‘civilized and technologically advanced people’. This was was true for a few hundred years, after the printing press (1300), but before telephone, (1890’s).