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Liam Rooney
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rodeosoul2000@yahoo.com

The Jackie Robinson of Rodeo

The Crockett rodeo officials had a problem: A black cowboy was entered in the bull riding...

The Disputed Champion

When the Pendleton Round-Up judges denied George Fletcher the 1911 bronc riding championship, a boisterous crowd disputed the results...

The Bronze Buckaroo

The hero wore a white hat and rode a white horse, but this was not the white West...

Rodeo Soul Documentary Film

Featuring the untold stories of the American West.

The Problem with Blazing Saddles
It started when Hollywood whitewashed the West

When Hollywood started making westerns, thousands of black cowboys dissolved into thin air as movie producers paid little heed to the true ethnicity of the American West. The exclusion of black cowboys was not a simple oversight. While studios churned out westerns at a frenzied pace there were often African Americans working on ranches and riding in rodeos within miles of the filming locations. The studios’ rationale for presenting an exclusively white West was that white audiences would only come to theaters to see heroes that looked like themselves.

Western films have always been tightly intertwined with the rodeo world and for many years most movie stuntmen were authentic cowboys.  During the silent film era hundreds of grizzled and banged-up saddle tramps were drawn to “Tinsel Town” by rumors of decent pay, regular hot meals, and comfy accommodations. The luckiest among them, after landing coveted positions as stuntmen or studio wranglers, would never suffer through another winter calving season. A few of these bona fide buckaroos, such as the Pendleton Round-Up champion Hoot Gibson and the former Wild West Show performer Tom Mix, catapulted their careers from stunts to star status.
 

But among the thousands of cowboys thundering across the silver screen, black cowboys were rarer than intricate plot lines. Hollywood wielded extraordinary power in shaping public perceptions while ticket sales, not historical accuracy, were the bottom line. The Hollywood whitewash was so effective that the notion of a black cowboy actually became a comical concept. Mel Brooks’1974 film Blazing Saddles, for example, relied on the premise that a black man wearing a cowboy hat and riding a horse was absurd. Had Brooks considered a West where African Americans drove cattle, upheld the law or broke it, served in the frontier cavalry, ranched, farmed, prospected, and rode in rodeos -- the humor of Blazing Saddles would have fallen flat.
 

Ironically, one of the first authentic cowboys to actually appear on film was the black cowboy Bill Pickett. World famous for his steer wrestling stunt, this wiry Texan was filmed bulldogging steers for a pair of silent movies produced specifically for black movie houses by the Norman Film Company. These films, which were shot on an Oklahoma location near the black town of Boley, included dozens of other black cowboys – authentic black ranchers who lived in the region – in addition to Pickett. Unfortunately, the Norman movies were filmed on the primitive celluloid of the time which meant they were literally eroding to dust just as the Hollywood western was becoming a popular genre.

© wild cow media 2009