De Vaquero to Cowboy Pt. 4: The Invisible Cowboys—Indigenous, Black, and Mulatto Vaqueros

 The History That Hollywood Forgot

The iconic image of the American cowboy is almost always white. A man in a Stetson and spurs, riding across the desert under a blazing sun. But walk into any real history of the American West, and that image shatters. The men who actually built vaquero and cowboy culture—the men who developed the techniques, broke the horses, roped the cattle, and risked their lives on the frontier—came in every color.

Here's what most people don't know: at least one in four working cowboys in the American West was Black. Some historians argue it was closer to one in three. And that's just counting those identified as Black in historical records—a category that was fluid, inconsistent, and often deliberately obscured.

Add Indigenous vaqueros and mulatto (mixed-race) riders, and the actual diversity of the Old West becomes something almost unrecognizable compared to the movies. Yet these invisible cowboys—and they were truly invisible, erased from photographs, excluded from roundup stories, and written out of official histories—were often the most skilled, most trusted, and most essential people on ranches and cattle drives.

The Black Vaquero: Estevanico and the Spanish Frontier

The story of Black people in the American West doesn't start with slavery in the American South. It starts earlier, in Spanish America, where the lines between slavery, freedom, and cultural identity were drawn very differently.

Estevanico (also known as Mustafa Zemmouri or Black Mustafa) is one of the first documented Black men to cross the North American continent. In 1536, he arrived in what is now the American Southwest as part of Cabeza de Vaca's expedition. He wasn't a slave, though he had been enslaved in his past. He was an explorer, a guide, and a cultural bridge between Spanish conquistadors and Indigenous peoples.

What's remarkable about Estevanico isn't just that he survived the brutal four-year journey across uncharted territory—it's that he was arguably the most effective member of the expedition at communicating with Indigenous peoples. He spoke multiple languages, understood cultural protocols, and had the kind of authority that a white Spanish officer simply couldn't command in unfamiliar territory.

When Estevanico died (likely in New Mexico, in 1539), he was at the height of his influence and reputation. He was directing expeditions, commanding respect, and living the life of a frontier explorer—not confined to the enslaved roles that would later become stereotypical for Black men in America.

But here's the crucial point: Estevanico was part of a system—the Spanish colonial system—that was very different from the plantation slavery that would later dominate North America. In Spanish America, a man of African descent could be a scout, a trader, an adventurer. He could marry, own property, and earn respect. It wasn't equality—racism existed in Spanish America too—but it was different.

The Black vaqueros who worked the ranches of Spanish Mexico and the early American Southwest inherited something of this tradition: a space where skill and competence could sometimes matter more than race.

The Rise of the Black Vaquero: Estevanico to the Cowboys

By the 18th and 19th centuries, Black men were integral to vaquero culture throughout Mexican territories and the American Southwest. Some were enslaved, brought north by Spanish and Mexican slave traders. Some were free men of color who had escaped slavery or been born free. Some were descended from African slaves, Indigenous peoples, and Spanish settlers—creating the complex, mixed-race categories that Spanish America called castas.

The conditions for Black men in Spanish and Mexican ranching were, paradoxically, sometimes better than in Anglo-American territories. On a Mexican ranch, what mattered most was your skill with horses and cattle. If you could rope, ride, and manage livestock, you had value. This created opportunities for Black vaqueros that often didn't exist in the American South or even in early Anglo-American settlements.

One of the most famous Black vaqueros was Charles "Nat" Love, also known as "Deadwood Dick." Born enslaved in Tennessee, Love eventually made his way west and became a celebrated rodeo champion in the 1870s. He could rope faster, ride harder, and win more competitions than almost any white cowboy of his era. According to his own autobiography, he roped 14 steers in 9 minutes and 35 seconds—a feat that made him famous across the West.

But here's the hidden injustice: even as Nat Love won competitions and earned fame, he was being photographed and celebrated less than white cowboys of equivalent (or lesser) skill. His accomplishments were recorded, sure—but they were often downplayed, contested, or erased from the official historical record.

Other Black vaqueros left less famous traces. Bose Ikard rode for cattleman Charles Goodnight and was trusted so completely that Goodnight said he had "no superior in horsemanship and bravery." Yet Ikard's story was nearly lost to history until recently. Jim Boyett and John Wesley Hardin—the latter a notorious gunfighter—had Black cowboys in their ranks, and these men did the same work as their white counterparts.

The practical value here is stark: these men could rope, ride, and survive in the most brutal conditions of the American frontier. They weren't tokens or sidekicks in real life (though Hollywood would later portray them that way). They were skilled professionals who sometimes earned more respect from other cowboys—at least on working ranches—than they would have in American towns.

The Indigenous Vaquero: A Continuity Across Conquest

While the presence of Black vaqueros represents a kind of diaspora into the West, the presence of Indigenous vaqueros represents something different: a continuity between pre-Columbian horsemanship and colonial vaquero culture.

When Spanish conquistadors brought horses to the New World, Indigenous peoples didn't immediately adopt them. That process took decades. But when it happened, it happened with remarkable speed. By the 18th century, Indigenous peoples across the Americas had integrated horsemanship so completely into their cultures that it became *indigenous* culture.

The vaqueros of northern Mexico and the American Southwest included many Indigenous men—Pueblo peoples, Apache, Comanche, and others. Some were incorporated into Spanish ranching society through forced labor or tribute systems. Some had been enslaved and later escaped or were freed. Some chose the vaquero way of life to maintain mobility, autonomy, and cultural identity in the face of colonial conquest.

What's striking about Indigenous vaqueros is that they often became better riders than their Spanish instructors. A Pueblo rider brought ancestral knowledge about horses, terrain, and animal behavior that no Spanish colonizer possessed. A Comanche vaquero brought an intimate understanding of horse culture. They had become legendary horsemen in their own right, and some of the greatest buffalo hunters and warriors of the Great Plains were mounted on horses they had acquired from Spanish herds.

One documented Indigenous vaquero was Antonio María Osio, a Californio of Indigenous heritage who wrote extensively about ranching practices and the nature of cowboy work. Though Osio wrote primarily in the 1850s and 1860s, after much of the ranching culture had already been disrupted by American conquest, his accounts provide crucial evidence of how thoroughly Indigenous peoples had been woven into vaquero society.

The trigger here is invisible but powerful: when you visit a ranch today, when you see a skilled rider handling livestock, there's a good chance you're witnessing techniques that were refined not in Spain but by Indigenous peoples who had adapted Spanish vaquero methods to the specific geography and animals of the Americas.

The Mulatto and Mixed-Race Vaquero: The Spanish Caste System at Work

One of the most important facts about Spanish America—and one that shaped the diversity of vaquero culture—is the existence of the casta system. Unlike the racial binary of Anglo-American society (where you were either white or not), Spanish colonial society had dozens of racial categories: mestizo (Spanish and Indigenous), mulatto (Spanish and African), zambo (Indigenous and African), and many more.

This system was hierarchical and racist—Spanish people were at the top, enslaved people at the bottom. But it had a crucial difference from Anglo-American racism: it wasn't absolute. A mulatto man could become free, marry across racial lines, own property, and achieve status based on wealth and accomplishment, not just (or even primarily) on racial category.

This created space for men of mixed heritage to become vaqueros. Some of the most celebrated vaqueros of Mexican California were mulatto or mixed-race men who had become wealthy landowners, skilled horsemen, and respected members of their communities. Their race was noted in historical documents, but their accomplishment wasn't negated by their race in the way it would be in Anglo-American society.

Juan Flores was a mulatto vaquero who became a legendary outlaw in California during the 1850s. He commanded respect and fear across the territory, and men of all races rode with him. What's significant about Flores isn't just his skill and daring—it's that his mixed-race identity didn't prevent him from becoming a figure of consequence in California history.

Similarly, many of the most respected vaqueros in Old California were of mixed heritage, and their positions of authority—managing ranches, training horses, leading roundups—are documented in historical records. When American settlers arrived and imposed their own racial categories, these men often found their social position suddenly undermined, even if their skills remained unchanged.

The Great Erasure: How Hollywood and History Forgot

So why are Black vaqueros, Indigenous vaqueros, and mulatto vaqueros invisible in popular history? How did the mythology of the American West become so thoroughly whitewashed?

The answer is complicated and involves deliberate historical choices. After the American Civil War and during Reconstruction, there was a powerful cultural backlash against Black participation in American life. Even though Black cowboys had been present and prominent in the West, they were systematically erased from photographs, written out of memoirs, and excluded from official histories.

When Buffalo Bill Cody created his Wild West Show—one of the most influential representations of American frontier history in popular culture—he specifically excluded prominent Black cowboys. This wasn't an accident; it was a choice. At the same moment that Cody was celebrating cowboys as American heroes, Jim Crow laws were being codified in the South, and segregation was becoming the legal structure of American society.

Hollywood amplified this erasure. The first Westerns, produced in the early 1900s, presented the frontier as almost exclusively white. When Black cowboys appeared at all, they were portrayed as sidekicks or servants. This representation became the dominant cultural image of the West, and that image was so powerful that it rewrote history in the popular imagination.

What's remarkable is that this erasure wasn't accidental—it was strategic. The mythology of the white cowboy served a purpose. It told a story about American frontier settlement that excluded inconvenient truths about slavery, about Indigenous dispossession, and about the actual diversity of the people who built the West.

The Skills No One Could Ignore

What's most powerful about the story of invisible cowboys is that their skills were so essential that they couldn't be completely erased, even by a culture determined to ignore them.

A rancher in Texas or California couldn't afford to exclude skilled riders based on race—not if he wanted to manage his herd effectively. So on working ranches, Black vaqueros, Indigenous vaqueros, and mulatto vaqueros worked alongside white cowboys. They rode the same routes, roped the same cattle, faced the same dangers.

Historical accounts sometimes betray this reality inadvertently. A cowboy memoir might not mention a Black coworker's race in the body of the text—because in the moment, what mattered was that the man could handle a steer or break a horse. Only in footnotes or asides do we learn that "Bill" was Black, or that the ranch's best roper was a mulatto vaquero from Sonora.

What this tells us is something crucial: the skills and techniques of vaquero culture were so valuable that they transcended the racial prejudices of the time. A man could be Black or Indigenous or mixed-race, and if he could rope and ride, he had a place in the working West.

This is not a comfortable fact. It doesn't erase the racism that invisible cowboys faced—the lower pay, the exclusion from certain spaces, the written-out contributions. But it does suggest something important: that racism wasn't inevitable or unchangeable, even in the American frontier. It was a choice, made by people who wanted to mythologize their own history and minimize others' contributions.

The Legacy of Invisibility

The erasure of Black, Indigenous, and mulatto vaqueros didn't end in the 1950s. It continues today in how the West is represented in media, how ranch culture is celebrated, and how the skills of vaquero horsemanship are discussed.

A modern rodeo audience watches a roper perform a technique that was perfected by men of every race, but the historical narrative they've absorbed centers on white pioneers and white cowboys. They see skilled riders and hear a mythology that was constructed by people who wanted the West to be exclusively theirs.

Next: When Two Worlds Collided

The invisibility of Black, Indigenous, and mulatto vaqueros was enforced by the cultural conquest that came after the American takeover of the Southwest. When Anglo-American settlers arrived in California and Texas, they brought their own racial categories, their own hierarchies, and their own determination to remake the West in their image.

In Episode 5, we'll examine what happened when the American cowboys—many of them fresh off the frontier or fleeing the South—encountered the established vaquero culture of Mexican California and Texas. It was a collision of two different worlds, two different racial systems, and two different ways of being a cowboy.

And it would transform the American West forever.