Black Cowboys

Black Cowboys, from iHeartPodcasts, corrects a gap the old Hollywood Westerns left behind. Roughly one in four cowboys on the 19th-century cattle drives was Black, and their names mostly got edited out of the myth. This show puts them back in. Episodes profile figures like Bass Reeves, the deputy U.S. marshal in Indian Territory who made more than three thousand arrests; Bose Ikard, the trail boss who rode with Charles Goodnight; Nat Love, who wrote his own memoir under the name Deadwood Dick; and Bill Pickett, the rodeo performer who invented bulldogging. The producers work with academic historians, descendants, and archivists, and the writing does not soften the contradictions of freed men taking work that sometimes meant enforcing laws against Native nations or hunting other Black men. You also hear about the all-Black towns in Oklahoma, the buffalo soldiers posted to the far western forts, and the Black ranch families whose brands still exist. Episodes run about 30 to 40 minutes and are tightly produced with music, archival readings, and multiple narrators. Good listening for anyone whose picture of the frontier could use more of the people who actually built it.