They tried to round up the cattle and rebuild their herds with slave labor, but eventually the Emancipation Proclamation left them without the free workers on which they were so dependent. Ranchers returning from the war discovered that their herds were lost or out of control. In doing so, the slaves developed the skills of cattle tending (breaking horses, pulling calves out of mud and releasing longhorns caught in the brush, to name a few) that would render them invaluable to the Texas cattle industry in the post-war era.īut with a combination of a lack of effective containment- barbed wire was not yet invented-and too few cowhands, the cattle population ran wild. While Texas ranchers fought in the war, they depended on their slaves to maintain their land and cattle herds. Though the Civil War hardly reached Texas soil, many white Texans took up arms to fight alongside their brethren in the East.
As an increasingly significant new slave state, Texas joined the Confederacy in 1861.
By 1860, fifteen years after it became part of the Union, that number had risen to over 30 percent-that year’s census reported 182,566 slaves living in Texas. By 1825, slaves accounted for nearly 25 percent of the Texas settler population. Though the Mexican government opposed slavery, Americans brought slaves with them as they settled the frontier and established cotton farms and cattle ranches. White Americans seeking cheap land-and sometimes evading debt in the United States-began moving to the Spanish (and, later, Mexican) territory of Texas during the first half of the 19th century. But cattle farming did not become the bountiful economic and cultural phenomenon recognized today until the late 1800s, when millions of cattle grazed in Texas. The cowboy lifestyle came into its own in Texas, which had been cattle country since it was colonized by Spain in the 1500s. And though African-American cowboys don’t play a part in the popular narrative, historians estimate that one in four cowboys were black. Love was African-American, born into slavery near Nashville, Tennessee.įew images embody the spirit of the American West as well as the trailblazing, sharpshooting, horseback-riding cowboy of American lore. Though Love’s tales from the frontier seem typical for a 19th-century cowboy, they come from a source rarely associated with the Wild West. And when not, as he put it, “engaged in fighting Indians,” he amused himself with activities like “dare-devil riding, shooting, roping and such sports.” He describes Dodge City, Kansas, a town smattered with the romanticized institutions of the frontier: “a great many saloons, dance halls, and gambling houses, and very little of anything else.” He moved massive herds of cattle from one grazing area to another, drank with Billy the Kid and participated in shootouts with Native peoples defending their land on the trails.
In his 1907 autobiography, cowboy Nat Love recounts stories from his life on the frontier so cliché, they read like scenes from a John Wayne film. An African-American cowboy sits saddled on his horse in Pocatello, Idaho in 1903.