Spitfire-Jenkins

Spitfire Jenkins is a true daughter of the West. Riding and roping with the best of them. Her powers have been an asset to her skills not the definition of them.

It is thought that, on some Texas trails, about a quarter of cowboys were black.
In the real Old West, as opposed to the film depiction, black cowboys were a common sight.
"Black cowboys often had the job of breaking horses that hadn't been ridden much," says Mike Searles, a retired professor of history at Augusta State University. His students knew him as Cowboy Mike because he gave lectures dressed in spurs, chaps and a ten-gallon hat.
"Black cowboys were also chuck wagon cooks, and they were known for being songsters - helping the cattle stay calm," he says.
Searles says his research, which included poring over interviews with ex-slaves in the 1930s, suggested black cowboys benefited from what he calls "range equality".
"As a cowboy you had to have a degree of independence," he says. "You could not have an overseer, they had to go on horseback and they may be gone for days."
Life was, nevertheless, harder for black cowboys than for their white counterparts.
Vincent Jacobs, 80, a former rodeo rider who lives near Houston, Texas, recalls the racism he faced when he was starting out.
"There would be separate rodeos for blacks and whites," he says. "It was hard, real hard - they would only let me perform after all the white people had been led out of the arena."
"Being a black cowboy was hard work," agrees 88-year-old Cleveland Walters, who lives just outside the town of Liberty, Texas.
"I hate to think of the racism I went through. When it was branding time, they'd put 20 cows in the pen and I was the one who had to catch them and hold them down. The brander was white - so in other words all the hard, dirty work was done by the black cowboys."
Both Jacobs and Walters grew up in the 1940s, watching Westerns but never seeing any black actors in major roles.
Not only did Hollywood ignore black cowboys, it plundered their real stories as material for some of its films.
The Lone Ranger, for example, is believed to have been inspired by Bass Reeves, a black lawman who used disguises, had a Native American sidekick and went through his whole career without being shot.
The 1956 John Ford film The Searchers, based on Alan Le May's novel, was partly inspired by the exploits of Brit Johnson, a black cowboy whose wife and children were captured by the Comanches in 1865. In the film, John Wayne plays as a Civil War veteran who spends years looking for his niece who has been abducted by Indians.

Spitfire Jenkins is a true daughter of the West. Riding and roping with the best of them. Her powers have been an asset to her skills not the definition of them.

It is thought that, on some Texas trails, about a quarter of cowboys were black.
In the real Old West, as opposed to the film depiction, black cowboys were a common sight.
"Black cowboys often had the job of breaking horses that hadn't been ridden much," says Mike Searles, a retired professor of history at Augusta State University. His students knew him as Cowboy Mike because he gave lectures dressed in spurs, chaps and a ten-gallon hat.
"Black cowboys were also chuck wagon cooks, and they were known for being songsters - helping the cattle stay calm," he says.
Searles says his research, which included poring over interviews with ex-slaves in the 1930s, suggested black cowboys benefited from what he calls "range equality".
"As a cowboy you had to have a degree of independence," he says. "You could not have an overseer, they had to go on horseback and they may be gone for days."
Life was, nevertheless, harder for black cowboys than for their white counterparts.
Vincent Jacobs, 80, a former rodeo rider who lives near Houston, Texas, recalls the racism he faced when he was starting out.
"There would be separate rodeos for blacks and whites," he says. "It was hard, real hard - they would only let me perform after all the white people had been led out of the arena."
"Being a black cowboy was hard work," agrees 88-year-old Cleveland Walters, who lives just outside the town of Liberty, Texas.
"I hate to think of the racism I went through. When it was branding time, they'd put 20 cows in the pen and I was the one who had to catch them and hold them down. The brander was white - so in other words all the hard, dirty work was done by the black cowboys."
Both Jacobs and Walters grew up in the 1940s, watching Westerns but never seeing any black actors in major roles.
Not only did Hollywood ignore black cowboys, it plundered their real stories as material for some of its films.
The Lone Ranger, for example, is believed to have been inspired by Bass Reeves, a black lawman who used disguises, had a Native American sidekick and went through his whole career without being shot.
The 1956 John Ford film The Searchers, based on Alan Le May's novel, was partly inspired by the exploits of Brit Johnson, a black cowboy whose wife and children were captured by the Comanches in 1865. In the film, John Wayne plays as a Civil War veteran who spends years looking for his niece who has been abducted by Indians.
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Contrary to popular belief, it was the bowler and not the cowboy hat that was the most popular in the American West, prompting Lucius Beebe to call it "the hat that won the West"
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