Who knows today that the first cowboys were Black? Using magnificent archives and historian testimonies, Cécile Denjean restores the original place of African Americans in the story of the West’s conquest. Our collective unconscious, nourished by Hollywood’s whitewashed and political rewriting, has adopted a largely distorted version of the conquest of the West, which gives only a minimal role to African Americans. Yet, in 1875, one in four cowboys was Black, and more than 250,000 Blacks fought in the Civil War. For many former slaves, the Far West offered greater freedom than African Americans would know for the next century. But how could one guess that the character of the Lone Ranger, a beloved hero of American popular stories, was likely inspired by Bass Reeves, the first Black sheriff and an incorruptible gunslinger, when the actors who popularized him on radio or the big screen were white?
The story of Reeves deserves to be told, just like that of Britton Johnson. This former captive, who went in search of his family kidnapped by Native Americans, inspired John Ford’s role given to… John Wayne in The Searchers, a film far from the black-and-white morality of Hollywood’s golden age westerns.