The West wasn't won just with white cowboys.

Between 15 and 30 percent of all cowboys - the on-the-horse, on-the-ground guys driving cattle from Texas to Montana - were black, according to Alex Rose, a guide with the National Historic Trails Interpretive Center.

"I think you're talking about a group of men who have entirely been left out of the history books," Rose said. "That's why we're doing this exhibit."

The center's exhibit for Black History Month - "Black Cowboys: The Forgotten Range Riders" - features fewer than a dozen photos of black cowboys along with some biographies.

"It was hard to find images," Rose said.

Yet un-whitewashed histories of the cowboy era from the 1860s to the turn of the century generally discuss the work of thousands of black cowboys, and surviving photographs of cowboy crews on average featured two or three black cowboys, he said.

A cowboy crew usually consisted of 10 men: eight whose primary job was to drive cattle, a wrangler and a cook.

The wrangler had one of the toughest jobs, caring for the horses, Rose said.

The cook, of course, was important for feeding the crew and acting as its doctors when the cowboys were injured, he said.

"Black cowboys often were given the toughest jobs," Rose said. "They had to prove themselves because they were black."

The emancipation during the Civil War granted them legal equality, but not necessarily equality in the eyes of the culture.

They either had been slaves or were the children of slaves, and most of them came from Texas with the prevalence of slavery and the burgeoning cattle industry, he said.

While they still faced racism, they usually had a better life than blacks who remained in the South after the Civil War. Despite the hardships of the cattle drives, the cowboys did have a sense of freedom and being able to chart their own destiny, Rose said.

The hard life of low wages, loneliness, extreme weather conditions, and the physical exertion forced all cowboys to rely on each other, he said.

Whether that made a difference is hard to tell, Rose said. "There was some sense of equality on the trail; you'd have to think working together would overcome [discrimination]."

However, the blacks apparently hit a rawhide ceiling because little evidence exists that blacks were crew chiefs, Rose said.

That probably wasn't a decision by the crews themselves but by those who hired them, he said. "You have some rich cattle barons who made a lot of money off black cowboys."

Likewise, black cowboys faced discrimination in frontier towns with businesses banning them and even prohibitions of them soliciting white prostitutes, Rose said.

History hasn't been kind, either.

As the cowboy era faded, media portrayals of the West effectively squashed the memory of black cowboys, Rose said. "Fiction kind of drives history."

Owen Wister didn't mention black cowboys in "The Virginian," and dime store novels didn't mention them, either.

The movies nailed the mythology.

Until recently, the blacks in most Westerns were either nonexistent or portrayed as clowns or jokesters, he said. Mel Brooks turned those portrayals upside down with his Western parody "Blazing Saddles" with Cleavon Little playing Sheriff Bart.

"When you think of cowboys, you think of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood," Rose said.

Reach Tom Morton at (307) 266-0592, or at Tom.Morton@trib.com.

The National Historic Trails Interpretive Center, 1501 N. Poplar St., is open from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.

For more information about the center or the "Black Cowboys: The Forgotten Range Riders" exhibit, call the center at 261-7780.]]->