This Town Ain't Big Enough - Hollywood's White Washing of the Wild West
“Are we awake?”
“We're not sure. Are we black?”
“Yes, we are.”
“Then we're awake, but very puzzled.”
– The first conversation between Sheriff Bart and Jim, Blazing Saddles (1974)
Western films are full of numbers: the opening two note melody of Enrico Morricone’s iconic The Good, the Bad and the Ugly theme, The Magnificent Seven, The Hateful Eight. The stereotypical cowboy of the silver screen has morphed into an almost mythological figure of epic proportions (and that’s not just his hat). The personification of not just the American West, but the spirit of freedom and raw masculinity, the cowboy is indelibly inked into Western culture and beyond.
I mean, I get it. I unashamedly admit to logging hundreds of hours of gameplay, roaming around the fictional Wild West in Red Dead Redemption 2. My cowboah accent is terrible but delivered enthusiastically at every opportunity. I have seen Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! at least four time in the theatre and wore out the VHS version with Hugh Jackman as Curly the rootin’ tootin’ singin’ dancin’ cowboy.
But there’s something very, very off about this mythological cowboy. Not just the seriously dodgy film physics and sometimes dubious costuming (itself immortalised in 1990’s Back To The Future Part III), but something more fundamental, that reveals an uncomfortably racist undercurrent to American cinema. The cowboy of stage and screen is decidedly white.
Of course, there are exceptions. Jamie Foxx’s turn as Django Freeman in Tarantino’s revisionist spaghetti Western, Django Unchained (2012), is unfairly overshadowed by Leonardo Di Caprio’s famous bloody hand scene. But his namesake, as seen in the original 1966 film, Django, was distinctly white.
Hang on city slicker, you might say, I reckon that most of them there cowboys in the Wild West were white, right?
Well, that’s where racism comes in. I could dance around the typical excuses of “it was a different time”, but to brush off the erasure of anyone non-white as merely symptomatic of the mid-to-late twentieth century is a problem in and of itself. The mythologising of the Wild West as a home for white men roaming freely and taking the law into their own hands is indicative of a central tenet of American and, more broadly, Western masculinity. It is, quite simply, racist.
In reality, the Wild West was neither all that wild, nor all that white. Most disappointingly, cowboys were also rarely gunslingers which, though unexciting, makes a lot of sense – if you spend years learning to wrangle horses as a way to make a living, you were unlikely to spend your time refining your quick draw. When we start to dig into the records of what really happened, and not what the movies showed us, a vastly different picture appears.
Assuming that we mean “cowboy” to be someone who got by through a combination of cattle wrangling, ranch hand work, and occasionally bronco busting, there were around thirty-five thousand cowboys in the Wild West (1866ish to 1895). Of these thousands, up to 25% of them were Black.
Time for a very quick, very simplified timeline of the important bits of American history (at least pertaining to cowboys and cowboy myths):
1861-1865: Civil War (big demand for horse handlers across North America, huge growth in cattle population in Texas & across the Midwest).
1866: Following 1862’s Emancipation Proclamation, the 13th Amendment was enacted across the USA (huge drop in demand for horse handlers).
1866-1886: Cattle trail industry peaks as the newly-united states begin to recover from the cost of war, “cowboy” created as a career path.
1880s: Expansion of railroads, growth of homestead farms and government-owned land means that the cowboy era disappeared as quickly as it came.
1899: Arguably the first “cowboy movie” filmed in Lancashire, UK of all places.
1909: NAACP founded.
1950s-1960s: The “Golden Age” of Western movies. Also, a key couple of decades for the Civil Rights movement.
1954: The case of Brown vs. Board of Education reaches the Supreme Court, finds that the policy of “separate but equal” (segregation) is unlawful.
1955: Black teenager Emmett Till murdered by a racist lynch-mob after allegedly whistling at a white woman. Rosa Parks flouted bus segregation laws. Her arrest leads to the Montgomery Bus Boycott and widespread protests. Western movie Wichita released to storming success in theatres.
1963: Martin Luther King gives his “I have a dream” speech. JFK assassinated.
1964: Voting Rights Act passed by Congress.
1966: Cinema scores are never the same again after The Good, the Bad and the Ugly hits cinemas.
1968: Martin Luther King Jr assassinated.
1969: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid released.
1974: Mel Brooks’ satirical Blazing Saddles is released starring Hollywood’s first Black Sheriff.
With everything laid out chronologically, it’s apparent that the story of cowboys and the demand for civil rights are unexpectedly closely intertwined. There’s almost a parallel between the creation of the resoundingly white cowboy myth and the heyday of anti-Black cultural activism, that is, the popularity growth of the Confederate flag, the erection of statues of “heroic” Civil War generals etc. Although movie cowboys are usually fighting for personal freedoms rather than any obvious party-aligned ideology, it’s hard to separate the popularity of stories of white men taking the law into their own hands from the social reality of the times. What better way of reassuring white people that their cultural and social dominance wasn’t going to be eroded than by giving them gun toting everyman heroes who they could admire and even emulate?
And so, we return to Blazing Saddles, and Gene Wilder’s reaction to waking up upside-down in a jail cell, ragingly hungover, with a Black man standing in front of him. Blazing Saddles is full of ridicule for the citizens of Rock Ridge, who are absurdly racist and willing to let their town be completely destroyed rather than accept Bart as their Sheriff. The uncomfortable reason for the lack of Black cowboys being seen on our screens is not this kind of absurd racism, but insipid, structural, systemic racism.
In the “real America” myth of the Wild West, these “real men” could shape their futures. They could throw corrupt officials out of town, tame a wild horse, shoot their way free of any trouble they got into, and gallop off into the sunset. This mythology of cowboys wielding ultimate individual power and standing as the last bastion of freedom against a changing world doesn’t allow for the reality that most cowboys were probably kind of underwhelming, and a large portion of them were not white. We bought into, and keep buying into, the myths as they are sold to us, not necessarily because we genuinely believe that we could emulate Clint Eastwood and drive a bad guy away with a single steel-eyed glare, but because we are content to accept the story that white people are the world’s “natural” heroes.
Films are escapism, yes, but they are also hugely influential on us individually, and also, more alarmingly, on entire cultural and national identities. Cowboy films, as with so many hero genres, are ultimately propaganda laden cultural forces and not benign pieces of entertainment. Of course, this doesn’t mean that every film is inherently problematic, or everyone who watches Western movies must therefore be a racist. But we need to be more aware, and far more critical, of what narratives get moulded into accepted “truths” via films, and why Black cowboys in films were so few and far between.
References
Blazing Saddles [Film]. Brooks, Mel (Director). (1974). Crossbow Productions and Warner Bros.
Back to the Future Park III [Film]. Zemeckis, Robert (Director). (1990). Universal Pictures.
Django Unchained [Film]. Tarantino, Quentin (Director). (2012). Columbia Pictures.
Django [Film]. Corbucci, Sergio (Director). (1966). B.R.C. Produzione Film Tecisa.
Red Dead Redemption 2 [Video Game]. (2018). Rockstar Games.
“World's first Western movie 'filmed in Blackburn'”. BBC News. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-50211023.
“Black History Milestones”. The History Channel. https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/black-history-milestones.
“Whose Heritage? 153 years of Confederate Iconography”. Southern Poverty Law Center. https://www.splcenter.org/20190201/whose-heritage-public-symbols-confederacy.
Black Cowboys of the Old West: True, Sensational and Little-Known Stories from History. Martineau Wagner, Tricia. (2010).
