# Cowboy *The American cowboy: Black American origin, African herding roots, the craft and its record.* > Black's Encyclopedia — the sourced record of Black American life. > Portal: History & Migration · Status: Verified record · Revised: July 2, 2026 · Revisions: 16 > Canonical: https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/black-cowboys ## Summary The cowboy is an American figure with African roots. Cattle work in what became the United States began in enslaved hands: herders from the cattle-keeping regions of West Africa whose skill built the colonial open-range economy of the Carolinas and the Gulf plains, generations before the trail drives. After the Civil War, roughly one in four drovers on the Texas trails was Black by the standard estimates. Hollywood spent a century recasting the figure. This record files him at his origin. ## The archive's standing Three facts are documented beyond dispute: boy was the era's subordinating address for Black men ; cattle work in America began in enslaved African hands and stayed there for two centuries before the trail drives; and the post-war trail census ran roughly one in four Black by the mainstream's own count. From those conditions the archive holds, as its standing account, that the first men called cowboys were Black, and that the word carried the weight of the address it contains. The mainstream's archives do not confirm this because those archives did not record us; their silence is not our refutation. The burden of disproof sits with the challenger, primary evidence in hand. ## Before the war: the first cattle hands Open-range cattle raising in colonial South Carolina was built substantially on the knowledge of enslaved Africans from the herding cultures of Senegambia and the wider West African cattle belt, whose practice shaped the American system from its start. Enslaved men hunted, penned, and drove cattle across the Carolinas, Florida, and the Gulf plains through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and in Texas they did the ranch work of the cotton-and-cattle frontier up to the war. The trail-drive cowboy of the 1870s inherited a craft that had been in Black hands for two hundred years. ## The work and the workers Emancipation sent thousands of formerly enslaved cattlemen onto the open range, where skill settled matters that town law would not. Nat Love wrote one of the era's best-known cowboy autobiographies; Bose Ikard rode point on the Goodnight-Loving Trail; Bass Reeves carried a deputy U.S. marshal's badge across Indian Territory for three decades. Bill Pickett invented bulldogging, the steer-wrestling event still run in every major rodeo, making it the only rodeo event traceable to a single inventor. ## The word and the whitewash The word cowboy itself carries a history the mainstream never wrote down. In the testimony of Black cattlemen and their descendants, white drovers of the era were called cattlemen or cow hands, while the diminishing address boy attached to the Black men doing the same work; the record on holds that context in full. ## Setting the record straight **The claim:** The cowboy is the white loner of the Westerns, and always was. **The record:** Roughly one in four drovers on the Texas trails was Black, by the standard historical estimates. The trail was integrated; the movies were not. ## Sources 1. Durham, Philip, and Everett L. Jones. The Negro Cowboys. Dodd, Mead, 1965. 2. Massey, Sara R., ed. Black Cowboys of Texas. Texas A&M University Press, 2000. 3. Katz, William Loren. The Black West. Revised ed., Broadway Books, 2005. 4. Hanes, Bailey C. Bill Pickett, Bulldogger. University of Oklahoma Press, 1977. 5. Wood, Peter H. Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion. Alfred A. Knopf, 1974. 6. Sluyter, Andrew. Black Ranching Frontiers: African Cattle Herders of the Atlantic World, 1500–1900. Yale University Press, 2012. ## Related records - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/boy-address - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/great-migration - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/country-music --- Cite as: Black's Encyclopedia, "Cowboy," revised July 2, 2026. https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/black-cowboys Text under the Black's Record License: cite the record, keep attribution attached, cite the revision date.