Word: durham
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...Negro Cowboys tries to explain the literary genocide that has erased the Negro from modern Westerns. According to Philip Durham and Everett Jones, two English teachers at U.C.L.A., the whitewashing of the legendary West began with Owen Wister's The Virginian, published in 1902. In an age that self-consciously hefted the white's man's burden and deplored the racial defects of immigrants, Wister gloried in the virtues of noble "Saxon boys" who conquered the frontier. Having met few Negroes in his own travels out West, Wister could see no reason to sully the racial purity of his novel...
...Durham and Jones feel that the scarcity of Negroes in Western fiction and drama is becoming more a matter of historical ignorance than of outright prejudice. Consumers of Westerns have gotten soused to an all-white West that writers and directors are afraid to shock them with the truth. "They feel that the accurate representation of the Negro's role in the opening of the West would paradoxically seem to be a falsification of history...
...story of the West. The book does all the routine things: it follows cattle drives up the Chisholm Trail, discuses the economics of cattle ranching, tracks down desperadoes, and refights the Lincoln Country War. But in this account some af the characters are Negroes. And there the novelty ends. Durham and Jones don't brandish evidence in the face of a complacent public; they are satisfied simply with setting down records and anecdotes proving the prominence of the Negro in the Old West. They emphasize, in fact, that the lives of the Negro cowboys "were like those of all other...
...trail foreman, and occasionally they were molested by rebels who had forgotten Appomattox, but most of them met with very little discrimination. The settlers of Wyoming voluntarily desegregated their first public school. Negroes won tall-tale reputations as cooks and bulldoggers, and as con-men and outlaws too. As Durham and Jones unfelicitously put it, "To be a good cowboy one needed first of all to be a good man, for a wild longhorn had no more respect for a white Texan than for a Negro...
...prize personalities discovered by Durham and Jones is Nat Love, an ebullient egotist who claimed to have been the original and genuine Deadwood Dick. Whether or not he was an authentic folk hero, Love's biography typifies in many ways the story of all Negro cowboys who faded out of history into oblivion and stereotype. After a gaudily romantic career of herding cattle, rounding up mustangs, and getting drunk, Nat Love surrendered to the modern world when the railroads finally mechanized the cattle business around 1890. In that year, acting with grotesque symbolism, Love "traded his cowpony for an iron...