Myrtis Dightman, known as “The Jackie Robinson of Professional Rodeo,” broke the color barrier in professional bull riding in 1964 as the first African American to compete in the National Finals Rodeo. — Witte Museum

After being corralled for two years, Black ropers and riders of the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo are saddling up once again for the summer — and their first live tour since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, with showcases scheduled in Los Angeles, Oakland, Atlanta, and the Washington, D.C., area — and tickets are selling fast!

Not only has the BPI Rodeo been a popular event throughout the U.S. during its 30-plus years, but there has been a heightened interest in the stories and histories of Black cowboys and cowgirls following the racial reckonings that happened throughout 2020 following the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others by police. Last year on Juneteenth, CBS televised the rodeo, marking the first time any broadcast network ever aired the event.

“With all the racial issues we’ve seen in our society, people are more engaged in seeking to learn more about this history,” says Valeria Howard Cunningham, who helped found the rodeo in 1984 in honor of legendary Texas rodeo bulldogger, Bill Pickett, who became famous for subduing steers by biting their upper lips.

Pickett, often viewed as more of a performer than a cowboy by some purists, is arguably the best-known Black cowboy in U.S. history — albeit nothing like the character portrayed in Netflix’s Western action flick The Harder They Fall, which featured the names of Pickett, Rufus Buck, Nat Love, “Stagecoach” Mary Fields, and other iconic African Americans of the Old West but little else bearing any resemblance factually, a point of contention for some historians.

“When we misrepresent history, we spend a lot of time as docents correcting that history because it’s confusing to people who don’t know these people already,” says Eleise Clark, a board member of Denver’s Black American West Museum & Heritage Center, who also serves as a docent. Clark is working on a project about Buck and plays Fields in reenactments across the country.

“It takes a long time to dig up any Black history,” Clark says. “I’ve been at it for decades, literally digging up the history on these people. If you don’t respect the true history of people, then you get distorted history — and cowboy movies are already distorted because there are no Black men in the old Westerns.”

For those familiar with the impact of Black cowboys and cowgirls, they hope sharing the history in cultural institutions, at events, and online helps to spread not only knowledge but positivity.

“African Americans have so much to be prideful about other than overcoming slavery,” Cunningham says. “This country would not exist today if it was not for African Americans. All aspects of business, life — everything. We have got to change how we look at our history as not something we overcame, but something that we built with pride.”

One in four cowboys of the American West were African American, a surprise to many because Black cowboys were never seen in old Western movies or prominently featured in history books. The fact is enslaved people of African descent worked with horses and cattle from their arrival in New Spain in the late 1500s to emancipation in 1865. In Texas prior to the Civil War, enslaved people made up 30 percent of the population, and freed Black cowhands contributed vastly to the development of the cattle industry, honing skills they learned on ranches and trails.

“Bill Pickett never had an enemy, even the steers wouldn’t hurt old Bill.” -Will Rogers, 1932

The Witte Museum in Austin, Texas, featured an extensive exhibition, “Black Cowboys: An American Story,” detailing the stories of the men, women and children — some enslaved, some free — who were an integral part of ranching and the cattle drives in Texas long before the Civil War and throughout the turn of the 20th century whose contributions to the American West and the U.S. cattle industry have long been buried.

Ronald W. Davis II, a Ph.D. candidate in the history department at the University of Texas in Austin who curated the “Black Cowboys” exhibition with longtime arts advocate Aaronetta Pierce, says the legacy of Black cowboys has been “denigrated, marginalized, and erased.” The exhibition which ran through April — parts of it can now be viewed online — revealed how deeply Black cowboys were to the ecology and economy of the Americas. “We’re making sure we do justice to these people,” Davis says, “who were denied justice in their lifetime.”

Actor Eugene Lee reenacting the stories from Hector Bazy, a formerly enslaved ranch hand who describing the dangerous but exhilarating work of the cattle trails, at the Witte Museum. — Photo Janice Rhoshalle Littlejohn

Hector Bazy, a formerly enslaved ranch hand who was emancipated at 14, wrote about his life on the Western frontier in his 1910 memoir, The Negro Cowboy. A portion of his 34-page manuscript is reenacted in a moving portrayal by actor Eugene Lee at the Witte describing the dangerous but exhilarating work of the cattle trails. Here’s an excerpt from the manuscript:

“After I was released from slavery I went to Harris county. There I commenced the cowboy life in earnest. In babyhood days the call of the winds and the wild-eyed cattle appeared to me. I seemed to understand them as no one else. Even though they looked wild to others, they looked docile and tame to me. They were my silent friends and I loved to be with them. That made me take up the life I have lead probably more than anything else. I loved to drive cattle on the open plains and to ride the worse bucking bronch that could be found.

“In the early days Houston was quite a cattle market. Often-times I drove cattle to this market. In those days a cowboy did not have a dozen different mounts, but was lucky, if he had two horses and a pack mule. In that time horses were hard to get that one could handle to do the business. The cowboy who had more to eat than hardtack and bacon was fortunate. We usually camped just where sunset found us and cooked our meat over a fire on a forked stick and sometimes we had to eat it raw when we were shorthanded or had signs of thieves or Indians. Both infested that part of Texas at that time and either was mean enough to do anything.”

A number of artifacts for the Witte’s “Black Cowboy” exhibition were sourced from across the country, including the ProRodeo Hall of Fame and Museum of the American Cowboy in Colorado Springs, Colorado, as well as the private collection of Larry Callies, a former mail carrier and rodeo rider who used his life savings to build the Black Cowboy Museum in Rosenberg, Texas. Located about 35 miles southwest of Houston, Callies’ three-room museum is an attempt to fill in the gaps where history has omitted the stories of local Black cowboys, including Callies’ own cousin Tex Williams, who in 1967 is believed to have been the first Black boy to win the Texas High School Rodeo Championship following the desegregation of high school rodeos.

Douglas Flamming’s book, “African Americans in the West” (published in 2009) provides an extensive examination into the lives of African Americans in the Western United States.

“The image of the cowboy is so vitally American,” says Davis, “and has been cultivated in a way to be white American, so that when we see these images of Black cowboys, it’s antithetical to how we understand America’s past. Because America’s past is told in a way that is uniformly white. The exclusion of Mexicans and African Americans from a lot of that narrative is sometimes jarring for people.”

The first historians of the Black West were themselves Black pioneers of the early 20th Century, according to Douglas Flamming, author of African Americans in the West, albeit more often pioneers of the urban West than of the rural West. Interest in this history began to swell in the 1970s as the civil rights movement of the South in the ’60s, along with the “long hot summers” of race riots in the North, sparked an unprecedented interest in the historical experiences of Black Americans.

During this time, notes Flamming, historian William Loren Katz began researching the Black experience in the West. He spoke briefly with Langston Hughes, himself a westerner by upbringing, who gave a fervent piece of advice: “Don’t forget the cowboys!” And Katz did not. In fact, the central thesis of his book, The Black West, repeatedly reminded Americans of the part Blacks played in America’s frontier experience.

An unidentified woman horse rider. Photo by Sarah Bird — Witte Museum

Black women were also an important part of the frontier story, oftentimes working alongside enslaved and freed men — many of whom were highly skilled ranch hands who took care of cattle and other animals.

Among the most notable women is Henrietta Williams Foster, known as Aunt Rittie. Foster, a legendary cowhand who lived in Refugio County in South Texas, was a formerly enslaved woman born in Mississippi. She was considered a tenacious, tough-as-nails woman who would ride her horse sidesaddle in long skirts and could perform the same work as the men. Simmie Rydolph and Monroe “Bailey” Shaw, two cowboys interviewed by historian and author Louise S. O’Connor in 1982, said she could throw calves and “do anything else a man could and maybe better.” O’Connor’s oral history, which is featured in the Witte’s exhibition, is the basis for a chapter on Foster in the book Black Cowboys of Texas.

There are several other mainstay destinations where the history of Black cowboys and cowgirls is being explored in the U.S., including the Buffalo Soldiers National Museum in Houston, Texas and the Great Plains Black History Museum in Omaha, Nebraska.

In 2001, Gloria Austin and her husband, Jim, opened the National Multicultural Western Heritage Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, which is also home to the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame and features African American inductees of the West, including ranchers Mollie Taylor Stevenson — both Senior and Junior; Colorado pioneer woman Clara Brown; former U.S. Marine and equestrian trailblazer Patricia E. Kelly; and Southern California real estate broker Mayisha Akbar, who founded Compton’s Richland Farms and established the nonprofit Compton Jr. Posse Youth Equestrian Program.

A young reader finds an attentive audience during a July 2020 farm visit (left); Caitlin Gooch (right), the founder of Saddle Up and Read. -Photo appeared in Poets & Writers, courtesy of Caitlin Gooch

The Black Western mythology lives beyond galleries, museums, and historical spaces as well. Caitlin Gooch, a modern horse rider known as “The Black Cowgirl,” promotes awareness of the legacy of Black equestrians. Through her nonprofit Saddle Up and Read, which takes place on her farm in North Carolina, she focuses on encouraging kids of color to read.

Gooch, who has been riding horses since she was a three-year-old, says she realizes how fortunate she’s been having grown up in this kind of agrarian lifestyle, and was eager to share it with other young people.

“I started to make Facebook posts and I would say, ‘Hey, bring your kids out and I’ll give horse rides.’ And then that evolved into me incorporating the books and the horses. And so once I saw that I was getting a lot of attention. I was like, You know what, let me actually teach horseback riding lessons to children,” Gooch says adding that riding lessons also comes with teaching kids how to respect and care for the animals.

Brianna Noble tends to one of her horses at her Urban Cowgirl Ranch. Photo courtesy of Urban Cowgirl Ranch

Brianna Noble, who became famous in 2020 for riding her horse through a George Floyd protest march in Oakland, California, hosts ride-alongs and teaches sustainable pioneering of livestock and horses in intercity spaces from her Urban Cowgirl Ranch.

She first learned about the history of Black riders when she began attending the Bill Pickett rodeo events in Oakland, and has been living and competing as a horsewoman since she was 19, and admits she’s still learning about the history of Black people in the old West. But as horses — and horse riding — become almost a thing of a past time lore, she hopes to bridge a future in which Black people forge new relationships with ranching and equestrianship.

“This is the first time in United States history that horses haven’t had a mainstream purpose,” she says. “Horses are no longer used for war, they’re you’re no longer used for traveling, for the most part. They’re not really used for farming either,. So what I’m trying to do with my ranch is give horses a new mainstream purpose, so that we can see our industry survive and expand, because the more people care about horses then we’re not going to see this disappear.”