One in Four: The Black Cowboys Who Rode the Trails

Picture a trail crew in 1870. A dozen riders, a cook, a wrangler with a hundred head of spare horses, and 2,500 longhorns strung out for a mile behind them, walking from South Texas to a Kansas railhead. Now look down the line. By the best estimates historians have, one rider in every four was a Black man. That is not a footnote. That is a quarter of the outfit that built the West we sing about.

Short Answer: Black cowboys were a large, ordinary part of the cattle-drive era. Historians estimate that roughly one in four of the men who rode the trails north from Texas between the 1860s and the 1880s was Black — thousands of riders, most of them freedmen who had learned cattle work under slavery and hired on as paid hands after the Civil War. They drew the same wages, rode the same drag, and faced the same stampedes as everyone else in the crew, then got written out of the story when Hollywood took over.

Why Texas Produced So Many Black Cowboys

Cattle work in Texas is older than the United States, and for most of its early history the people doing the roughest parts of it were enslaved. The 1860 census counted 182,566 enslaved people in Texas, roughly 30 percent of the state's population, and many of them worked ranches, not cotton rows. They broke horses, pulled bogged calves out of mud, and worked wild longhorns out of the brush country. When the Civil War pulled white Texans east, those enslaved hands kept the ranches running.

Then two things happened at once. Emancipation made those men free, and the war left Texas herds scattered, half-wild, and worth almost nothing at home while beef up north sold for close to ten times the Texas price. The only way to get a steer to a buyer was to walk it to a railhead, and ranchers needed skilled riders in a hurry. The most skilled riders available were the freedmen who had been doing the work all along. Ranchers hired them, and the great drives up the Chisholm Trail and its cousins began.

What "One in Four" Actually Means

Honesty is the brand, so here is where the number comes from. In 1965 two UCLA professors, Philip Durham and Everett L. Jones, published The Negro Cowboys and estimated that at least 5,000 Black men worked as cowhands in the late-1800s West. Historian Kenneth Porter went through trail-outfit rosters from the 1860s to the 1880s and put the count at 6,000 to 9,000 out of roughly 35,000 riders who went up the trail, which works out to somewhere between one in six and one in four. The Smithsonian uses the one-in-four figure, and so do we.

Two things to keep straight. It is an estimate built from crew lists and payrolls, not a census, so treat it as a range. And it belongs to the drive years: by the 1890 census, with the range fenced and the drives finished, only a few hundred men in Texas were still listed as Black cowboys. The number is not a myth, but it lives in a specific twenty-year window when the trail was the only road north.

Life on the Trail Versus Life in Town

On the trail, a crew was a crew. Black hands drew the same pay as the white riders beside them, around $30 to $40 a month plus board, and worked every position: point, swing, drag, night guard, horse wrangler, and cook. When a herd stampeded at two in the morning, nobody stopped to sort out who was who. A man was judged on whether he could sit a horse, read cattle, and hold his end when the river was up. The best account from inside a crew is Nat Love's 1907 autobiography, and the thing he keeps coming back to is loyalty: men who would share their last ration and only blanket with a partner having a bad night.

Town was different. The same riders who had shared a bedroll on the Red River could be turned away from a hotel or restaurant in a Kansas cow town. That contrast is what made the trail matter. Out there, a man's work was the only thing anyone measured. The vaqueros who taught the trade had lived the same truth a century earlier.

Four Riders Worth Knowing

Bose Ikard (1843–1929)

Born into slavery in Mississippi and brought to Texas as a boy, Bose Ikard went to work for Oliver Loving in 1866 and, after Loving's death, rode four years with Charles Goodnight on the Goodnight-Loving Trail. Goodnight trusted him with the outfit's cash in country where there were no banks and later said he trusted Ikard farther than any living man. When Ikard died in 1929, Goodnight bought a granite marker and wrote the epitaph himself: served with me four years, never shirked a duty or disobeyed an order, rode with me in many stampedes, three engagements with Comanches, splendid behavior. If the scout Deets in Lonesome Dove ever rang true to you, that is because Larry McMurtry built him on Bose Ikard.

Nat Love, "Deadwood Dick" (1854–1921)

Born into slavery near Nashville, Nat Love went west at fifteen and spent two decades on the trail as a hand and later a foreman. On July 4, 1876, after delivering a herd to Deadwood in Dakota Territory, he entered the town's Independence Day contest and, by his own account, roped, threw, tied, bridled, saddled and mounted a wild mustang in nine minutes flat, taking the $200 purse and the nickname that stuck for life. His autobiography is the only full-length memoir we have from a Black cowhand of that era. Scholars will tell you he stretched a few stories, which puts him in the same company as every cowboy who ever sat by a fire. When the drives ended, he went to work as a Pullman porter, which tells you what happened to a lot of good riders when the range closed.

Bill Pickett (1870–1932)

Born in Travis County, Texas, to formerly enslaved parents, Bill Pickett watched cattle dogs control a steer by biting its lip and figured a man could do the same. He would ride alongside a running steer, drop onto its horns, twist its head, and bring it down. He called it bulldogging. Pickett rode his first rodeo in 1888, joined the Miller Brothers 101 Ranch Wild West Show in 1905, and performed for more than twenty-five years. He died in 1932 after a horse accident on the 101. In 1972 he became the first Black cowboy inducted into the National Rodeo Hall of Fame, and the ProRodeo Hall of Fame followed in 1989. Every steer wrestler you will ever watch at a rodeo is running Bill Pickett's play.

Bass Reeves (1838–1910)

Not a trail hand, but no honest list of the Black West leaves him off. Commissioned a deputy U.S. marshal in 1875 out of Judge Isaac Parker's federal court at Fort Smith, Reeves worked Indian Territory for thirty-two years, longer than any other deputy in that country. He spoke several tribal languages, could not read, memorized his warrants, and is credited with more than 3,000 arrests. He is the closest thing the real West had to the lawman of the movies.

The Buffalo Soldiers Tie-In

The same frontier the herds crossed was garrisoned by Black troops. On July 28, 1866, Congress created six segregated regiments, the 9th and 10th Cavalry and four infantry regiments that were consolidated into the 24th and 25th Infantry in 1869. Plains tribes gave the cavalrymen the name Buffalo Soldiers, and the units carried it with pride. They built and guarded the posts along the trails and escorted the mail, the surveyors, and the wire crews. Cowboy and soldier were often the same kind of man in the same kind of country, working under the same sky.

Why You Never Heard This

Three things closed the window. Barbed wire fenced the open range, railroads reached deep into Texas so the herds no longer had to walk, and by the 1890s the trail-drive cowboy was out of a job. Black riders, who found it harder to buy land, mostly moved on to other work. Then the Western movie took over the story. The film cowboy was built to sell tickets, and for half a century he was cast one way. That is the version we took apart in Real Cowboys vs. Hollywood, and the missing Black rider is the biggest thing it left out.

The Trail Never Ended

The story picked back up in the arena. In 1964 Myrtis Dightman became the first Black cowboy to qualify for the National Finals Rodeo, and he went on to win Calgary in 1971 and Cheyenne Frontier Days in 1972. In 1970 Cleo Hearn became the first Black cowboy to win a calf-roping title at a major rodeo, and the next year he started producing rodeos that became the Cowboys of Color circuit. In 1984 a Denver promoter named Lu Vason, who had sat through Cheyenne Frontier Days without seeing a single Black competitor, founded the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo. It is still touring, more than forty years on, and it is the only touring Black rodeo in the country.

Here is the part worth carrying with you. The trail did not care where a man was born or what he had been. It asked whether he could do the work and whether he would stand by the man next to him when things went wrong. The riders in this story answered yes, over and over, in a country that had not yet decided to give them credit for it. They rode anyway. That is what we mean by honoring the cowboy: not a costume, but the character of everyone who ever earned the name. One in four of them looked like Bose Ikard, and the West is theirs too.

Quick Answers

What percentage of cowboys were Black?
Historians estimate about one in four riders on the post-Civil War Texas cattle drives were Black. The range runs from roughly 17 to 25 percent, based on trail-outfit rosters and ranch payrolls, and it applies to the drive era of the 1860s through the 1880s.

Who was the most famous Black cowboy?
Bill Pickett, the inventor of bulldogging (steer wrestling), is the best known. Nat Love, called Deadwood Dick, wrote the only full autobiography by a Black trail hand. Bose Ikard was Charles Goodnight's most trusted rider on the Goodnight-Loving Trail.

Were Black cowboys paid the same as white cowboys?
On the trail, generally yes. Wages ran about $30 to $40 a month plus board regardless of race, and crews worked as equals. Discrimination showed up in town, where Black riders could be refused service at hotels and restaurants.

Who were the Buffalo Soldiers?
Black U.S. Army regiments created by Congress on July 28, 1866: the 9th and 10th Cavalry plus infantry regiments later consolidated into the 24th and 25th. Plains tribes gave them the name. They garrisoned the same frontier the cattle trails crossed.

Is the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo still running?
Yes. Founded in Denver in 1984 by Lu Vason, it remains the only touring Black rodeo in the United States.

— The Sackett Ranch Family

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