How The West Was...
Hollywood gave us a mask. History gives us the face beneath it.
When we think of the Wild West, the picture is almost automatic: saloons with swinging doors, six-shot revolvers, a sheriff’s badge pinned to a dusty vest, horses tied outside, Native Americans on the horizon, and cowboys riding into the sunset. It is Hollywood shorthand, instantly recognizable and endlessly repeated. But the Wild West as we imagine it never really existed, and what version of it did only came into focus after the Civil War.
Before the Civil War: The Frontier That Was
The frontier before the Civil War looked nothing like the Wild West of cowboy myth. It was not yet a land of cattle drives and six-shooters. It was a patchwork of territories, empires, and contested ground.
Much of the land west of the Mississippi was still territory rather than statehood, governed from afar by Congress and overseen by territorial governors. Real authority on the ground often belonged less to Washington and more to those who lived there.
Native nations controlled vast stretches of the continent. The Lakota, Comanche, Apache, and many others held power in ways U.S. settlers could not ignore. They patrolled trade routes, defended homelands, and dictated the pace of expansion. To enter much of the West was to step into Native country.
The Southwest carried the imprint of Spain and Mexico, with Catholic missions, ranches, and vaquero traditions shaping daily life. Even after the U.S. seized these lands in 1848, their language, customs, and labor remained the backbone of the region.
Settlement was sparse. Outside of gold-rush California or river towns along the Mississippi and Missouri, life revolved around forts, farms, and trading posts. Saloons, railroads, and cattle boomtowns were still decades away.
Beneath it all lay the question that would tear the nation apart: would the new territories allow slavery. The battle over Kansas showed how the frontier was as much a political powder keg as a cultural one.
This was the West before the Wild West, a place of contested sovereignties, empires colliding, nations holding ground, and settlers clinging to the edges. Out of this crucible the cowboy would emerge, not as a solitary hero but as a figure carrying the imprint of all these cultures on his back.
Spanish & Mexican Vaquero Traditions
When the United States imagines the cowboy, it often forgets the vaquero, the first horsemen of the Americas. Long before the Civil War, long before Hollywood, the vaquero rode the ranges of Mexico and the Southwest. Spanish colonists in the 1500s brought horses and cattle, reshaping landscapes and economies. From that world came the vaquero, a skilled cattle herder whose art turned survival into a profession and whose legacy still threads through every part of cowboy life.
The saddle with its high pommel, the spurs, the rawhide chaps, the lasso twirling above a rider’s head, all of these were vaquero inventions. Even the words that define cowboy culture today, rodeo, lasso, corral, chaps, and buckaroo, a mishearing of vaquero, spoke Spanish before they spoke English. Techniques of branding, herding, and long-distance cattle driving were mastered here first, centuries before they were folded into U.S. frontier lore.
Vaqueros were not just laborers, they were cultural torchbearers. They fused Spanish equestrian traditions with Indigenous knowledge of land and animals, creating a hybrid style suited to the harsh environments of the Southwest. This was not a hobby or pastime. It was a way of life passed down across generations, embedding horsemanship, craft, and community into the very soil.
So when post–Civil War America turned cattle driving into its frontier symbol, it was not inventing something new out of dust and grit. It was borrowing, inheriting, and reshaping traditions that had already flourished for centuries to the south. The saddle, the lariat, the long ride across open country belonged first to the vaqueros.
The cowboy is Mexico’s gift to the American imagination, proof that the West was never the work of one people alone. To celebrate the cowboy without honoring the vaquero is to miss the point entirely. Every American myth about the open range carries a Spanish echo, a Mexican imprint, a reminder that cultures did not just collide in the frontier, they built on each other, leaving hoofprints still visible on the trail.
African American Cowboys
The frontier was shaped long before the first longhorn was driven north. It was shaped by the fault line of slavery. Kansas bled in the 1850s, when pro-slavery and anti-slavery settlers turned the prairies into a battlefield. The Missouri Compromise split and then collapsed under the pressure. By the time the Civil War erupted, the West was not a blank slate. It was already a proving ground for freedom and bondage.
When the war ended, emancipation freed millions, but it did not grant them land, security, or the justice they had been promised. What many African Americans carried with them were the skills forged under bondage: horsemanship, animal care, farming, and endurance in the face of hardship. These skills, honed in servitude, became tools of survival and opportunity on the frontier. For thousands, the West represented not only new land but also a chance to step into roles denied to them in the East and South.
It was here, on the cattle trails stretching from Texas to the Kansas railheads, that the African American cowboy rode into history
On the open range, African Americans became a backbone of the cattle industry. Historians estimate that one in four cowboys was Black, a staggering number that reshapes the image of the frontier. They rode as drovers pushing herds north, as ranch hands branding cattle and breaking horses, as scouts guiding drives across rough terrain, and even as trail bosses trusted with entire operations.
The work was brutal, but the trail could act as an equalizer. A man’s worth was measured by how well he stayed in the saddle, roped a steer, or held his nerve when a stampede tore across the prairie. For weeks on end, far from towns and courts, skin color mattered less than skill. Around the campfire, voices blended in work songs and stories, carrying rhythms and traditions that would ripple into American culture.
Yet when the herds reached the railheads in Kansas or Dodge City, Jim Crow reasserted itself. Black cowboys were denied lodging, barred from saloons, or pushed to the margins of the very towns they helped supply. Their labor fueled the cattle boom, but their faces were erased from the legend.
And still they left a mark history cannot erase. Nat Love, known as Deadwood Dick, became famous for his roping and sharpshooting. Bose Ikard rode with Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving on legendary Texas cattle trails, later immortalized in Lonesome Dove. Bill Pickett, the son of formerly enslaved parents, invented the rodeo sport of bulldogging, a technique still performed in arenas today. These men carried forward not only skill but a claim: the West was built by Black hands as much as by any others.
To celebrate the African American cowboy is to restore truth to the myth. It is to put him back in the saddle where he always was.
Native American Influence
If the West after the Civil War opened new doors for some, it closed them for others. For Native nations, the same cattle trails and railroads that brought opportunity to settlers cut through their homelands, dismantling ways of life that had endured for centuries. Forced removals, broken treaties, and open warfare defined the era. The U.S. Army drove tribes onto reservations while settlers carved up sacred hunting grounds and rivers. Yet under relentless pressure, Native peoples adapted, resisted, and reshaped their place on the frontier.
Long before cowboys rode the open range, Native nations had already mastered the horse. Horses first arrived with the Spanish in the 1500s, introduced in Mexico and the Southwest. Over time some escaped or were traded into Native hands, spreading north through networks of exchange and capture. By the 1700s the horse had transformed life on the Great Plains. The Comanche became so renowned for their riding that Europeans called them the Lords of the Plains. The Lakota, Crow, and Nez Perce likewise built entire cultures around the horse, reshaping hunting, travel, and warfare. Settlers pushing westward often found themselves learning from Indigenous riders whose skill surpassed their own.
When cattle drives surged northward in the late nineteenth century, many Native men (and some women) hired on as cowhands, scouts, and guides. They brought with them not only horsemanship but also deep environmental knowledge. They could read a storm before it broke, track strays across rough country, or find water where others saw only dust. For ranchers moving thousands of cattle across an unforgiving landscape, this knowledge was priceless.
Their influence can still be traced in the details of cowboy life. The fringed buckskin jacket, thought of as frontier fashion, came from Indigenous design, the fringes shedding rain and drying quickly. Plains-style beadwork and motifs decorated saddles and gear. Even the iconic image of the lone rider silhouetted against the horizon owes something to Indigenous horse culture, where the bond between rider and mount was as much about identity as survival.
And yet, like the vaquero and the African American cowboy, Native contributions were erased from the dominant story. In the Hollywood myth, Indigenous people became faceless adversaries, obstacles to progress instead of the riders, workers, and innovators who helped define the West.
History tells another story. Native horsemen left hoofprints on every trail. Their horsemanship, knowledge, and resilience shaped the very essence of cowboy culture. To erase them is to erase the land itself, for the cowboy’s West was built on ground first tended, traversed, and defended by Native nations.
Expansion and Railroads
By the late 1860s the Civil War was over, the railroads were stretching westward, and America’s appetite for beef was booming. The open range became a corridor of both opportunity and exploitation. Cattle ranchers in Texas, where herds had multiplied almost unchecked during the war, needed to move their stock to market. The railheads in Kansas and Missouri offered the gateway. What stood between was hundreds of miles of rough country, hostile weather, and the constant threat of stampede or theft.
This was the world that made the cowboy indispensable. For two decades, from about 1866 to the mid-1880s, the great cattle drives defined the frontier. Cowboys of every background rode thousands of miles to move longhorns north to rail lines that carried beef to booming cities in the East. They endured blistering heat, freezing storms, swollen rivers, and prairie fires. Nights were spent under open skies, guarding herds from rustlers and predators. Pay was meager, injuries common, and death always near at hand. Yet the image of freedom clung to the cowboy, even as his labor looked more like the grueling, low-wage work of modern migrant labor.
The expansion of the railroads reshaped the West even more dramatically. Each new stretch of track brought settlers, speculators, and towns that rose almost overnight. The cattle drive era was brief. Once railroads reached deeper into Texas and the plains, the long drives dwindled. By the 1880s barbed wire and private land claims carved up the open range, fencing in what had once seemed endless. The cowboy became less of a working figure and more of a cultural memory, already being mythologized in dime novels.
For those brief decades, the cowboy was the hinge between America’s industrial future and its frontier past. He bridged the gap between cattle on the hoof in Texas and beef on the table in New York. He was not a drifter with a six-shooter. He was a laborer tied directly to the engines of capitalism and expansion.
This is the paradox at the heart of cowboy culture. The cowboy embodied grit, freedom, and open horizons, but his work was grueling, underpaid, and temporary. He was celebrated in story while exploited in reality. And in that tension the myth of the cowboy took root and spread, recasting the exploited worker as the rugged individual.
Mythmaking & Hollywood
Even as the cowboy’s working life was fading, his legend was beginning. By the 1880s barbed wire had closed the open range, railroads had erased the long drives, and industrial ranching had replaced seasonal herds. The cowboy, once an underpaid and short-lived profession, was becoming something larger: a symbol.
The myth was built first in the pages of dime novels, cheap paperbacks that churned out endless tales of gunslingers, outlaws, and stoic cowboys taming the wilderness. These stories exaggerated or invented heroics, often casting cowboys as lone saviors in a hostile land. In reality cowboys worked in teams, relied on communities, and were far more diverse than the novels ever admitted. But myth works best when it simplifies, and the cowboy became a canvas for rugged individualism.
Next came the Wild West shows of Buffalo Bill Cody, traveling spectacles that brought a choreographed frontier to cities across America and Europe. Audiences cheered at staged battles between cowboys and “Indians,” at sharpshooters and trick riders, at a West that was already vanishing but now repackaged as entertainment. Native performers sometimes joined these shows, often the only way left to earn a living from skills once used to defend their people, but their roles were scripted as foils to cowboy heroism.
By the early twentieth century Hollywood had taken over. Silent films like The Great Train Robbery (1903) and later classics starring John Wayne or Gary Cooper enshrined the cowboy as the quintessential American hero: white, male, armed, and free. Gone were the vaqueros who taught the craft, the African Americans who made up a quarter of the workforce, and the Native horsemen whose knowledge ran deeper than any ranch manual. In their place stood the cowboy as nationalism wanted him: a solitary figure proving that America’s destiny was to conquer, civilize, and expand.
This is where the myth turns dangerous. By celebrating the cowboy as the ultimate individualist, Hollywood and popular culture buried the reality that cowboying was collective, diverse, and rooted in labor. The cowboy was not a lone wolf. He was a worker in a larger system. By erasing that truth, the myth could be used to justify modern politics: the gun on the hip, the man above the law, the nation that sees conquest as freedom.
The cowboy lives on less as history than as ideology. And that ideology still rides today, invoked in everything from political campaigns to car commercials. It tells us America is rugged, self-reliant, white, and destined to dominate, even though the real cowboy was Mexican, Black, Native, poor, and tethered to the land he worked.
So, We Ride
The cowboy was never just one man on a horse. He was the vaquero carrying centuries of Spanish and Mexican craft in his saddle. He was the freedman who rode west with nothing but skill and grit, carving dignity from labor the nation tried to erase. He was the Native rider whose mastery of horse and land predated all of it, whose knowledge still echoes in every trail crossed. He was the underpaid worker driving cattle to railheads, enduring storms and loneliness so that city tables could groan under beef.
And then he was rewritten.
The dime novel, the Wild West show, and the Hollywood reel stripped him down, bleached him out, and sold him back as a myth: the white rugged individualist who conquered the wilderness by sheer will and firepower. The cowboy became a national brand, a story America told itself to bury the messier truth, that the West was built by many peoples, through collective struggle, under exploitation, and against conquest.
But telling the fuller story is not “woke.” It is celebration. It does not erase history, it enriches it. Knowing that the cowboy was Mexican, Black, Native, poor, and resilient does not weaken the myth. It makes it stronger, more human, more real. It honors the people who lived it, not the caricature sold back to us.
The past should never be a prison. Learning about it should be freeing. To understand how our ancestors really lived, in struggle, in cooperation, in adaptation, is to see ourselves more clearly. Cowboy culture is not just about hats and horses. It is about how memory works, how nations mythologize, and how truth waits beneath the myth for anyone willing to dig.
The cowboy’s shadow still rides with us. The question is whether we will keep worshiping the myth or finally honor the truth.
TOW
The cowboy was never one thing. He was Mexican, Black, Native, poor. He was sweat, skill, and survival before he was ever a myth. That does not erase history. It deepens it. It means our ancestors lived richer, harder, braver lives than Hollywood ever gave them credit for.
Calling that truth “woke” is cowardice. It is not woke to celebrate the vaquero’s craft, the Black cowboy’s resilience, or the Native rider’s mastery. It is history, real, hard-earned, alive. To see it clearly is to step free of the prison built by half-truths.
The cowboy’s shadow still rides with us. The choice is simple. Live with the cartoon or honor the people who built the West as they truly were.
ETHER
The cowboy is a mask. A mask painted white, fitted to a myth, marched across dime novels and flickering screens. But masks crack. Beneath them lie the vaquero’s rope, the freedman’s hand, the Native rider’s silhouette against the horizon. That is the face they buried. That is the face that endures.
The prison is not the past. The prison is the lie, the story polished so bright it blinds us. To see the riders as they were is not weakness and not “woke.” It is power. It is remembrance sharpened into resistance.
They want you to believe the West was conquered by one man. It was not. It was built by many. And if you listen closely you can still hear them, a chorus of hoofbeats in the static, a rhythm no myth can silence.
