"Cowboy culture refers to a style of ranchingintroduced in North America by Spanish colonists in the 16th century—a time when most ranch owners were Spanish and many ranch hands were Native. None of the first cowboys were (non-Hispanic) white. And while historians don’t know exact figures, by the late 19th century roughly one in three cowboys (known as vaqueros) was Mexican. The recognizable cowboy fashions, technologies, and lexicon—hats, bandanas, spurs, stirrups, lariat, lasso—are all Latino inventions...
The story of one of America’s most eminent frontiersmen, Jim Beckwourth, formed the basis for 1951’s Tomahawk, which starred a white actor even though Beckwourth was black. The famous 1956 Western epic The Searchers was based on a black man named Britt Johnson. He was played by John Wayne, one of the genre’s biggest movie stars, who in 1971 told Playboy, “I believe in white supremacy until blacks are educated to the point of responsibility.” Even the fictional character of the Lone Ranger (who originally debuted in a radio show in 1933) shares striking similarities to Bass Reeves, believed to be the first black U.S. Deputy Marshal west of the Mississippi."
FB: "In a 1993 Chicago Tribune article about Beckwourth, the writer commended the aforementioned films for their palatable diversity while criticizing 1993’s Posse for being “too politically correct” with its all-black cast (which, historically, would have been more plausible). Both before and following the Civil War, many black men fled to the frontier for a cowboys’s life of freedom. The broad notion of “freedom” stitched into the seams of the Western canon has far more cultural significance than the genre has ever truly acknowledged.
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