Filling an empty saddle
Exhibit explores lives, work of Black cowboys missing from history
Historian Ron Davis was floored the first time he saw a Black rodeo and even more stunned when he learned that Black cowboys have been around in the United States since before the Civil War.
“I didn’t know Black people rode horses,” said Davis. “It’s a testament to the erasure of Black cowboys.”
He is doing his part to combat that. In addition to writing a dissertation on Black cowboys for his PH.D., he co-curated a new exhibit on the subject for the Witte Museum.
“Black Cowboys: An American Story” is a visually striking show. It explores the lives of Black men, women and children who worked on Texas ranches starting before the Civil War all the way into the 21st century.
Davis curated the exhibit with Bruce Shackelford, the Witte’s Texas history curator.
The first thing that visitors see is a glass case that underscores the need for exhibits like this one, Davis said. It includes a saddle that was used by a Black cowboy whose name is lost to history.
“It’s an empty saddle that represents this missing narrative,” he said.
Visitors will learn about the roots of Texas ranching, which blends elements from Spanish ranches and the African traditions that enslaved people brought with them to the United States.
They also will explore personal stories, getting to know Al Jones, who was one of the few Black trail bosses in the 1880s; Henrietta “Aunt Rittie” Williams Foster, known for holding her own among the male cowhands; and Daniel Alexander, who was born into slavery and became a respected rancher and horse breeder who trained Copper Bottom, Sam Houston’s horse.
There’s also a display about Nat Love, who earned the nickname Deadwood Dick after winning every category in a cowboy contest in Deadwood, S.D., in 1876. A fictionalized version of Love is played by Jonathan Majors in the Netflix revisionist Western “The Harder They Fall.”
Visitors also can learn about Hector Bazy in his own words. One of the showstoppers in the exhibit is a short film in which actor and playwright Eugene Lee plays Bazy. The script was drawn from a manuscript
the cowboy wrote about his life in 1910 and includes vivid descriptions of the physically demanding work he did.
“Outside of Bill Pickett’s autobiography and Nat Love’s, this is one of the most interesting narratives of what it was like to be a cowboy in the 19th century,” Davis said. “There’s a part where he talks about Black and white cowboys getting along, but then right after that, he just talks about Black cowboys, which is really interesting.”
For Davis, it evoked sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois’ writings about double consciousness, the idea that Black people are constantly having to see themselves through the lens of a racist society.
“He’s clearly straddling that line and showing that we were able to work together when we needed to, but racism still existed,” Davis said. “You see that in his manuscript. It’s so powerful and moving, actually, the way he writes about it.”
A few 21st-century figures get their due, too, including Leon Coffee, known for his decades of work as a rodeo clown,
Larry Callies gets a spot, as well. Callies made a name for himself as a roper and as a singer, opening for Selena, Travis Tritt and others until he lost his voice in the 1990s.
“Me being a Christian, I asked God what he wanted me to do, and he said, ‘Open up a Black cowboy museum,’ ” Callies said. “He told me step out in faith.”
He started collecting items, and in 2017, he opened the Black Cowboy Museum in Rosenberg, near Houston.
It’s important that the stories of the Black cowboys are preserved and shared, he said.
“What they did is important for this country and important for this world,” he said. “And if it wasn’t being told, no one would ever know.”
The Witte exhibit has been in the works for about three years. It is the brainchild of arts advocate and civic leader Aaronetta Pierce, who suggested the museum tackle the topic as a way to engage young people. Marise Mcdermott, the museum’s president and CEO, agreed the history was ripe for a deep dive.
She also asked Pierce to work with the Witte to pull it together. Pierce agreed to chair the exhibit’s steering committee.
“I think that for us, it’s normal to know where the omissions are,” Pierce said. “It’s so appropriate that Santikos (Entertainment) is a sponsor, because the movies, the television programs — the only time I ever saw a Black person in a western was in ‘Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.’ There was a Black family that reappeared in the story. Otherwise, I believed there were no Black people in the West.”
The exhibit helps set that right by telling a story that has often been left out of the history books, too, even though Black people played a significant role in the West. Of the cowboys who went out on the trail, 1 in 4 was Black, and many more worked on ranches.
“It’s almost as though we have to realize how we came to be here,” Pierce said. “As Maya (Angelou) says, we didn’t invent ourselves. We came here enslaved. And worked. Participated. Built. And that has to be acknowledged and recognized and honored. And that’s what this exhibit means. It’s just as simple as a man on a screen, being able to say we were there. It’s so simple.”