Cowboys of Colour

A young cowboy living in Dimmit County - Texas, make his money by capturing and taming wild mustangs. He spends his nights sleep under the stars, isolated from humans, slowly gaining the trust of the mustang herd. Then when they least suspect it, he mounts the lead stallion, uprooting the herd hierarchy and leads the herd to a pen nearby. To complete his mission, he must be smart, responsive, quick on his feet, adaptable to any situation and physically fit. There are no other cowboys in American history to equal this mans’ talent for capturing mustangs. Robert (Bob) Lemmons: The Greatest Mustanger of All Time.  

What do you imagine this man to look like? If his story were to be recreated by Hollywood, one might imagine a Clint Eastwood type playing America’s greatest Mustanger when in fact, he looked more like Morgan Freeman.

Bob Lemmons’ story starts somewhere between 1847 and 1848 in Lockport, Texas where he was born a slave, his given name only known to his birth mother. Seventeen years later, after the civil war, Robert gains his freedom and quickly finds employment on Lammons Ranch run by Duncan Lammons himself. During his time working for Duncan Lammons, he learns about horses and their behaviour, how to farm and how to herd cattle. Also during this time, he takes on the surname Lemmons – which is a variation of the name of the ranch he worked at. By 1870 at the age of 22, Bob has amassed a small fortune from gathering mustangs, enough to buy himself a ranch of his own. Later in life, Bob and his wife would be known amongst their neighbours as great saviours, as their financial security and impressive holdings of horses and cattle enabled them to help others through the Great Depression. Bob Lemmons lived a long, healthy life and died after fathering eight children with his wife at the approximated age of 99 years old in December of 1947.

You’ll never see a cowboy who looks like the real Bob Lemmons in popular media. Cowboys who looked like him have largely been ignored and subsequently erased from cowboy history. The invisible center of whiteness in cowboy history was principally manufactured by Hollywood. Where real cowboy history is littered with men of colour, Hollywood delegates men of colour to the roles of villains or sidekicks needing to be tamed or conquered along with the wild west.

The construction of American nationalism depends heavily on the myth of the great white cowboy. When the nation was manufacture, so was the American masculinity and the cowboy was the perfect embodiment of that ideal. The professional cowboy was rugged, solitary, typically an able-bodied physique who could live off the land was often romanticized to live by a code of honour. The only problem with real cowboys was they tended to men of colour. During the great cattle driving era between the 1870's and the 1880's anyone who could ride a horse could be a cowboy as demand for horse riders was high. It's likely of little coincidence that this was the same era Joane Nagel describes as a 'renaissance of manliness' (1998). The cowboy ideal was refocused on the invisible center of whiteness when Western movies rocketed to popularity in the late 1930's. With male leads such as John Wayne, Roy Rogers and (of course) Clint Easwood it implicitly implied by the hegemony in Hollywood that men of colour did not become and never were cowboys. I'm grateful that today we have access to so many resources, including the real history of past cowboys and the diversity within the profession. I hope that popular media will take that diversity into account with representing cowboys in the future and we won't have Django as the only contemporary cowboy of colour to look up to.