killing the buffalo was
Blacks in the Wild West
I recently had the opportunity to participate in one interesting discussion on Facebook on the page of a famous film critic. One of my friends complained about the dominance of political correctness in the new westerns – here in the trailer of the new “Gorgeous Seven” a black character appears, as in many previous westerns of recent years, where “racial diversity” is almost a prerequisite. Without the “black cowboys” nowhere. Although we know that real cowboys should be white, and “Afro-cowboys” have the same relation to historical truth as, for example, the black knights at the court of King Arthur – that is, no one – but they help to attract African-American audiences to the cinemas and protect against criticisms of the liberal public that “the problems of cisgender white middle-aged people no longer bother anyone.” Continue reading
Europeans were still more attracted by Indians
Cowboy did become a frequent hero of tabloid novels and large-circulation newspapers in the 1870–80s, but, as Lonn Taylor convincingly showed, his image, although heroic, was not uniform. In the 1880s, he turns out to be more antisocial: “a rude, dangerous, recalcitrant and daring individualist,” in any case, when fate confronts him with a sedentary urban population. The new image was created by the middle class of Eastern America, where farming was very strong, and this image was very literary. This can be seen not only from a comparison of the cowboys with the medieval knights of Thomas Malory and the popularity of the one-on-one duel at exactly noon, like a knightly duel, but also from the European origin of some “western” topoi. Continue reading
Cowboy clothes
But it became later, and at the beginning each group was actually a pioneer, for the first time laying trails, determining parking places and water availability. The most famous among them were Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving, with a group of 19 cowboys. They independently organized the transfer of livestock and mastered the track, later called the Goodway-Loving Pathway (from Fort Belknap to Fort Sumner). Continue reading
