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[00:00:04]

Hey, and welcome to the short stuff, I'm Josh and there's Chuck, who knows where Jerry is, but this is short stuff, so it doesn't matter because we can handle it ourselves with a little assist by our friend Dave Couston.

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Yeah, I don't think we don't shout out Dave enough.

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Not nearly enough. As a matter of fact, let's just make this episode just talking about how great David's right.

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The original black cowboy. That's right. But totally wrong. But it was a it was a decent attempt at a Segway.

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Yeah. Because we all know the original black cowboy was Sheriff Bart in Blazing Saddles.

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Oh, yeah. Yeah. I forgot about that movie. That's a is that a good one?

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I mean, it's a classic. It couldn't be made today. Sure. But, you know, written by Mel Brooks and the great Richard Pryor and I think there was one other co-writer, but yeah, they played that for comedy in that movie. But as it turns out, there were a lot of black cowboys in the United States and you just don't see a bunch of movies and TV shows where they're represented. Shock, shock. But they were I mean, there are some statistics that say 25 percent or more of our all cowboys after the civil war in the Wild West.

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Were these black men out there like doing cowboy stuff, working hard, roping cattle, doing all the things that you see in the movies?

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Yeah, I like the idea, from what I can tell from the research, is that the popular conception of cowboys and cowboy life and what Cowboys did is fairly accurate.

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But the the race of them is what was off that that the just the fact that black people were not all represented among cowboys in the popularization of, you know, cowboy life back east. It's just that's the historical misunderstanding. And that apparently even before the Civil War, most black cowboys, according to one historian of the American West, most of them, most of the cowboys were black and that it was a job that was open to enslaved people, basically, and that if you were white, you didn't want to be known as a cowboy, that that job was potentially beneath you or whatever, even though it was all about Bronco busting and, you know, herding cattle and lassoing and stuff like that.

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All the stuff we think of with cowboys today. But that that transition between being from something that me that was like beneath a white guy out west to something that was a coveted title among white guys was when East people started to hear about cowboys and say, that's cool, what a cool life. And then all of a sudden white guys were like, Oh, actually, I'm a cowboy now. You can count me in.

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Yeah. I mean, I think that that name, at least according to this historian, is racist in nature because the white workers wanted to be called cowpunchers or cowhands and the black men were called cowboys. And like you said, once they once law hit back east, they jumped on that cowboy train because I guess that word took in. It sounded cool. Yeah.

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The thing is, I went and tried to corroborate that elsewhere because it makes sense if you take it from that standpoint that, oh, is that actually cowboy actually has like a denigrating origin. But I did not see that anywhere else and I couldn't find the difference between a cowhand and a cowboy. They are completely interchangeable, from what I can tell, definition wise. But I don't know, maybe that just that etymology got lost to history, you know?

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Well, Larry Callies runs the Black Cowboy Museum in Texas and Rozenberg and we want to credit him with saying that since he's he's where we got it.

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Yeah. Here, Larry. Here's the limb. Let's go out on it. So the idea of black cowboys and cowboys in general really kind of came out of this migration of southerners, especially Southern whites, moving out west to Texas for the chance for cheap land wide open spaces, the promise of a new chance for a fortune because the South had really become industrialized as far as Agrarianism is concerned. And Texas had a lot of opportunity, especially if you were willing to push Spanish settlers and indigenous people from Mexico off of their land, you could really make a name for yourself in Texas.

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And a lot of those white settlers brought enslaved people with them and they were the earliest black cowboys out there.

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Yeah, because what happened was, you know, you're in Texas, you get roped into the Confederacy and then these white people who moved out west go back east to fight in the civil war. They left the people that they enslaved by. Trying to, you know, keep the ranch going basically, right, and those that was sort of the beginning of the black cowboy movement, it really was.

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What's interesting is that it was triggered by the civil war, that that the civil war created that kind of niche and in need sorry, that need for cowboys of all stripes, but that they that typically fell to African-Americans who who were doing this work while the whites were off fighting the war.

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And then when the war was over, when the the white confederates came back to Texas, they were like, hey, I don't know if you heard or not, but we're free now. So you have to pay us for this work. And because a lot of hurdles had been broken up and lost, there was a lot of work to be done getting these herds back in order and getting Texas back up and running economy wise, especially with cattle herding.

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Yeah. So maybe let's take a break and we'll talk about some of the more famous of these black cowboys right after this.

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Hey, I'm Charlie Sanders, and I'm bald, and I am Brian Husky, I am also bald. We're the host of the new podcast Bald Talk from the Big Money Players Network and I Heart Radio. Before this, I was a writer and producer for Key and Peele and created the show Weird City than I appear on Bob's Burgers and Veep.

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But the show is not just about being bald. So for you, Harrows out there, there's a lot to glean from our show. It's about insecurity, vanity. Hold.

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But you run. Veep has on every season knew that. Oh, you were the mean congressman, dude, right? No, no, no. That's Dan back at all. He's actually a guest. Oh, OK. You were the press dude, Mike McClintock. No, no, no, no. That's Matt Walsh, who is also a guest. Oh, wait, wait, wait. I remember you you were a TV producer, the presenter that that's Paul Scheer.

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He was on Veep, too. But we have him on the podcast as well. Yeah. The show is not about having people who are barred from Veep to hell of a coincidence. You got to say that, right? So we'd be very limiting.

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What is Macaulay Culkin like? I don't know. I'm not on succession.

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That's the other one, I think. But that's his brother, right? There are so talented.

[00:07:10]

Those who listen to ball talk on the radio, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to a podcast, play ball talk, a ravenous pandemic, a ruinous recession, protest riots, racial strife, police brutality and yes, Donald Trump.

[00:07:25]

America in 2020 feels like Apocalypse Now again. I'm John Heilemann and in hell on high water.

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I'll explore this moment in a series of raw and real conversations with the people who shape our culture. Hell and High Water is a podcast from the recount.

[00:07:40]

Listen to Hell and High Water on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

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All right, so if you look at the history books and TV shows and movies, you hear a lot about Wild Bill Hickock and Annie Oakley and all these sort of legendary Wild West figures, you don't hear as much about the black cowboys who were also legendary figures just in the same way like they would. You know, some of them were bad guys who would shoot up a saloon and have a gunfight in the middle of the street at high noon. Many of them, obviously, were just regular cowboys who did hard work day and night wrestling cattle.

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Some of them also, Chuck, were even lawmen, too. There was a guy named Barsa Reeves who was the first African-American marshal, U.S. marshal west of the Mississippi. And he had a 32 year career and apparently was so morally unimpeachable that some people insist he was the the model for the Lone Ranger.

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I know. And that crazy it is. And I have to tell you, I grew up on the Lone Ranger, the 1980 two or three movie. Oh, like the movie? Yeah. Yeah, it informed my childhood.

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I also watch the TV show, too. Yeah. Like a place that and everything. That was a big time into the Lone Ranger. I watch that movie within the last couple of months. It is one of the most boring movies I've ever seen in my life. That doesn't hold up, does it?

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I was like, my parents must have been like, what is wrong with this kid? This movie is just like watching paint dry.

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There's like five parts that are that are interesting and the rest is like just slowly stringing together those parts. It's really weird and the chemistry is like baking soda and more baking soda. Like nobody has any chemistry. And like my it means that there's nothing and there's no reaction.

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I tell you what I love, though, about that movie is that that color blue of his outfit.

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It's the star of the movie basically.

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Yeah. On the color of his hat too, because it was white, but it wasn't stark white. He was sort of this creamy white. Yeah. He had a tinge of badness to him maybe when needed, but I guess not. Another famous black away from back in the day was a man named Boz Icard. He is in the Hall of Fame at the National Multicultural Western Heritage Museum and Hall of Fame. God bless the people who founded that.

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I know.

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And he was the right hand man to one. Colonel Charles. Good night. He was a big, super successful cattleman in Texas. And apparently, if you've ever read or seen Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry, he's sort of classic Western. I never have the the character of Joshua Deets was based on him, played by none other than Danny Glover, who was not too old for that.

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Yes. Who is what? He was not too old for that. Yes, that's the big one. Yeah, I'm getting too old for this. That was great joke. I'm sorry I had you repeat it. That's right.

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So there's another one named Bill Pickett, who was a very famous rodeo guy. He he was one of the first African-American rodeo men, I guess. And he invented the the sport of steer wrestling, which is where you ride up alongside a steer and grab him by the horns and drag him to the ground or at least hear it.

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It's really awful, especially when you when you understand what he came up with was called bulldogging, where it was a technique that he would overwhelm the steer with pain by biting its lip.

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And he was inspired by watching dogs herd cattle. So he tried it himself. He's like, this really works. But he was a genuine trailblazer in the rodeo world. And despite the fact that he was barred from competing in a lot of rodeos, even though he was among the best, that rodeos were segregated for a very long time. And if you were an African-American rodeo cowboy, you had to compete either late at night or early in the morning before the actual rodeo started, or else you might have your own rodeo altogether.

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I mentioned outlaws. There was a man named Isomerism Darte. Hmm. He was an enslaved person who who went the other way and he was a horse thief. Like so many other horse thieves, he would steal horses and cattle in Mexico, drive him across that big ol Rio Grande River, sell them off in Texas. And like so many outlaws, he was he was shot down by a hired gun in this case, Tom Horn. And I'm thinking of movies.

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I think there have been a couple of movies where they did represent these black cowboys, but it always seemed like these movies were sort of a not a trick, but just kind of like a like stunt casting, like you were going to make a movie with black cowboys. How different instead of, well, this is just a movie like any other Western, because this is how it was exactly.

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And I'm sure that they were all just left out of the history books because of some oversight. But I'm glad we're here correcting it today.

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Well, we're trying our best.

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There's also we would be very, terribly remiss if we didn't mention the most famous black cowboy of all time, one night love, also known as Deadwood Dick.

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Is that. No, it's not.

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I specifically saw in a couple of places I really fight it. Yeah. His name was he was born Nathaniel. And I guess they just didn't feel like adding the E, which is significant because he was taught to read and write despite being born enslaved. His father taught him to read and write. So he was educated enough that he actually wrote his own autobiography in 1970 1987. I should have just kept it as 1970. That sounded kind of old timey.

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But Chuck, I think you need to read everybody the the title and note that there is not a single colon. Found it.

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Yeah, it's Life and Adventures of Nat Love, and it's spelled in that in the autobiography time.

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I swear it's Nate.

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Well, I'm looking at the book cover. I know. I'm telling you it's pronounced Nate, OK, but. There is no easy I just want to point out to people, life and adventures of blank love, better known in the cattle country as Deadwood Dick by himself, Colin, a true history of slavery, days, life on the great cattle ranges and on the plains of the wild and woolly west based on facts and personal experiences by the author.

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There is a coal and I thought that was a semicolon. There's always a colon, isn't there? And seems to be. But he was like you were describing like he would get in shoot outs and he was kind of known as abandoned or an outlaw in some circles. But from what I can tell, he was just a legitimate, bona fide cowboy and he led a cowboy life like any other cowboy would be fantastic.

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It really is fantastic. Very, very big self promoter like so many of those cowboys back then. Yeah, for sure.

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They say that they're not entirely certain where. In fact, it departs from fiction in his autobiography, but it's apparently a heck of a read.

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So go check it out. And I guess I said check it out, which means that that short stuff is out. It's out. Stuff you should know is a production of radios HowStuffWorks for more podcasts, My Heart Radio, is it the radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows?