netmgr@coax.net
Without the services of the eight or nine thousand Negroes - a
quarter of the total number of trail drivers - who during the
generation after the Civil War helped to move herds up the cattle
trails to shipping points, Indian reservations, and fattening
grounds and who, between drives, worked on the ranches of Texas
and Indian Territory, the cattle industry would have been
seriously handicapped. For apart from their considerable numbers,
many of them were especially well-qualified top hands, riders,
ropers, and cooks. Of the comparatively few Negroes on the
Northern Range, a good many were also men of conspicuous
abilities who notably contributed to the industry in that region.
These cowhands, in their turn, benefitted from their
participation in the industry, even if not to the extent that
they deserved. That a degree of discrimination and segregation
existed in the cattle country should not obscure the fact that,
during the halcyon days of the cattle range Negroes there
frequently enjoyed greater opportunities for a dignified life
than anywhere else in the United States. They worked, ate, slept,
played, and on occasion fought, side by side with their white
comrades, and their ability and courage won respect, even
admiration. They were often paid the same wages as white cowboys
and, in the case of certain horsebreakers, ropers, and cooks,
occupied positions of considerable prestige. In a region and
period characterized by violence, their lives were probably safer
than they would have been in the Southern cotton regions where
between 1,500 and 1,600 Negroes were lynched in two decades after
1882. The skilled and handy Negro probably had a more enjoyable,
if rougher, existence as a cowhand than he would have had as a
sharecropper or laborer. . . . Negro cowhands, to be sure, were
not treated as “equals” except in the rude
quasi-equality of the roundup, stampede, and river-crossing -
where they were sometimes tacitly recognized even as superiors -
but where else in post - Civil War America, at a time of the
Negro nadir, did so many adult Negroes and whites attain even
this degree of fraternity? The cow country was no utopia for
Negroes, but it did demonstrate that under some circumstances and
for at least brief periods white and black in significant numbers
could live and work together on more equal terms than had been
possible in the United States for two hundred years or would be
possible again for nearly another century.
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