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As Black History Month draws to a close, and we reflect on the countless ways that African Americans have struggled for and contributed to American society, we rightly focus on the likes of political courage, personal integrity, intellectual insight, and artistic inspiration. Contributions to material culture and social institutions are certainly vital.
If we acknowledge only these, however, we unwittingly acquiescence in (Anglo)America’s cultural myopia when it comes to romanticizing the West—the popular image of which is white. Of course history takes note of the thousands of African Americans who turned vast areas of the Great Plains into farm and ranch land. It records, too, how the thousands of African Americans heading up the Mississippi to the Chisholm Trail, and Kansas, led to a blockade of the river, with the blessings of President Rutherford B. Hayes, and the strategies of General Thomas Conway. Government; force notwithstanding, African Americans purchased and settled on over 20,000 acres of land in Kansas alone within a few years (Katz, 1996).
Despite these priceless records, there; exists no mythical or romanticized cultural image of a West across whose plains gallops the black gunfighter, a West whose saloons ring with the gunfire African American outlaws and desperados. Where in the public imagination is the romanticized, uncritical image of the black; Billy the Kid or Jesse James? The western hero exists as an object of fantasy, eroticized and embraced by a popular (Anglo)American audience. More than a blend of masculinity and femininity or a complication of gender roles (Cawelti ,1976; Creekmur, 1995), more than an experience of the frontier or an encounter with the unknown (Koldney, 1984; Slotkin, 1973, 1994, 1998; Smith, 950; Tompkins, 1993), (Anglo)America’s hero exemplifies a self-conscious, self-assured, self-centered American agency basking in the approbation of a culture devoted to sentimental notions of home and hearth (Hendler, 2001).
One approach to unpacking this hero is to see him as an extrapolation of Sigmund Freud calls “primitive,” dependent on a “process of thinking [that] is still to a great extent sexualized,” with an “unshakable confidence in the possibility of controlling the world” with “intellectual narcissism and the omnipotence of thoughts” (Freud, “Totem and Taboo”). His is "an unassailable libido-position," "the seat of a multiplicity of sensations," an "erotogeniczone" (Freud, “On Narcissism”). Sentimentally heroic, he symbolizes an escape into nationalistic imaginary, a “multiplicity of sensations,” a self-consciousness embracing home and hearth and heroism (Merish, 2000). A metaphor for a social psyche (Rogin, 1994), he “satisfied, if only in fantasy, the increasingly strident popular cry for a homogeneous social order” (Jones, 1978). “[S]ubjectivity, identity, politics,” the “scenarios of [self]representation” overshadow all (Hall, 1995), obscure the contingency of identity (Warner, 1990).
The western hero, however, is white America’s most anxious identity or image. For any desperado to gain such cultural currency, he must be symbolically linked to the idealized “angel in the house” whom he serves by symbolically defended a highly sentimentalized, white domesticity and femininity. In short, he must own the body on which his public never ceases to gaze, the body that thus becomes the site of a multiplicity of sensations, the body that simplifies then solves cultural problems, the body that espouses the manner s and mores of the elitist, capitalist, materialist, white perspective for whom he performs.
 | African American gunfighters and desperados had such bodies, had such simplistic and romantic approaches to cultural complexity, but had no audience willing to have them espouse (Anglo)American “ideals.” Nat Love saw himself this way, and made certain, as did Wyatt Earp, that his image of himself as western hero was recorded. He took the name “Deadwood Dick” on July 4, 1876 in a rodeo at Deadwood City in the Dakota Territory nearly a year before Beadle’s created a dime novel hero with that name. A friend of Bat Masterson’s, he was an audacious a self-promoter: “I carry the marks of 14 bullet holes on various parts of my body” (Katz, 1996, 151-2). In his 1907 autobiography he recounts living with Indians, riding 100 miles in 12 hours without a saddle, and riding his horse into a saloon where he bought himself, and his horse, a drink of whiskey, which they both finished. Yet where is he in “America’s mythic West? |
George Monroe, a nineteenth-century Pony Express rider and Overland stage driver, did have Monroe Meadows in Yosemite named for him. However, he, like William Robinson, with whom he rode Pony Express, never arrived at a place where his actions and attitude earned him the status of cultural icon. |  |
 | As black men whose bodies were marginalized by (Anglo)American stereotypes of masculinity, domesticity, and femininity, neither Monroe, nor William Robinson (left) have been incorporated into (Anglo)America’s simplistic, romantic, and sentimental image of itself. |
Cherokee Bill (Cranford Goldsby) [above center with left hand in his pocket], whose father was in the 10th Cavalry, had his first gunfight at 18. His skill with guns, and his love of the outlaw life, led to his being hanged at the age of 20. Even though the lawmen that hunted and finally captured him crowded into this picture to be recorded with him, Cherokee Bill does not live on in popular legend.
Neither does Ben Hodges, who, like Wyatt Earp lived by gambling, gunplay, and a penchant for carrying that double-barreled shotgun when he went to play poker. |  |
 | Isom Dart, a former slave, learned his cattle-rustling ways foraging for Confederate officers during the Civil War. After the war, in Texas and Mexico, he rustled for himself, prospected, broke broncos, and rode with the Gault Gang. The man hired to kill him in 1910, Tom Horn, lives on in legend, but not Isom Dart. |
Like the self-promoting, white western hero, African American gunfighters worked to record their romantic agency. Although there are more self-consciously posed images of black gunslingers than there are of white gunslingers, (Anglo)America has another image of the West. |
