Michael Benedict

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Howdy, followers. Today, I’m going to show you these old pictures of African Americans in the American Old West, also featuring photos of famous and legendary Black figures that I considered them as legends of the American western history.

I’m going to be honest with you all as I’m going to give prosperous facts; African American were and still are cowboys and cowgirls. We already had these skills of saddling, cattle ranching, farming, agriculture, and riding horses, back in the ancient times in Northern/Western Africa before Christ, Islam, and colonization. It was an golden age back than.

Bill Pickett (1871-1932), rodeo performer.

Nat Love, aka Deadwood Dick (1854-1921), cowboy and saddler.

Jesse Stahl (1879-1935), cowboy and rodeo star.

John Ware (1845?-1905), rancher, saddler, and cowboy.  

James Pierson Beckwourth (1805-1866), mountain man, fur trader, scout, and explorer. 

Isom Dart (Ned Huddleston) (1849-1900), cowboy, criminal, and outlaw.  

Bass Reeves (1838-1910), lawman and deputy U.S. marshal

George Fletcher (1890-1973), rodeo star and cowboy. 

George Glenn  (1850–1931), cowboy.   

Dangerfield Newby (1815-1859), freedom fighter and rebellion.    

Mary Fields (1832-1914), mail courier. 

Harriet Tubman (1820-1913), freedom fighter, slave rebellion, scout, spy, nurse, and guerrilla soldier. 

John Horse (1812–1882), slave rebellion and freedom fighter. 

Now, here are old pictures of black people in the old American west. 

This is John Ware and his wife and kids. 

That’s Bass Reeves. 

Bill Pickett’s family members. 

This is Harriet Tubman in her previous age. 

 Sojourner Truth (1797-1883), abolitionist and human right activist. 

It started happening during the spring of my junior year in high school. 

First it was every few weekend nights, then every other night. Then every night. Our mailbox at end of the driveway would curiously separate itself from its post. I would find it laying in the yard right next to the base each morning while backing out of the driveway on my way to school.

We lived on a cul-de-sac, so the possibility of reckless drivers repeatedly knocking it off was impossible. It was firmly attached, so wind was also unlikely. Yet each morning it was on the ground, upright, so we just kept re-securing it by tightening the nuts and bolts without stressing too much about why they kept loosening. 

Repairing that dumb mailbox became one of my high school chores. Like mowing the grass;  faster but less peaceful.

One day I went out to get the mail and noticed the lawn around the mailbox post was discolored in an odd manner, like it had a fungus or something. I got down on my hands and knees to take a closer look - something was definitely happening in that exact area and nowhere else in the yard. A day later those off-white splotches began to turn orange. 

I pulled some blades, along with a few healthy ones for comparison and planned to take them to school to show my botany enthusiast biology teacher and see if he knew what could be causing it. But later that same week the discoloration which at first appeared to be random patches filled out and that examination was no longer necessary. The lawn and mailbox mysteries were solved.

It wasn’t a fungus. It was a swastika. Beneath it also in bright orange were the words Go Home.

The mailbox troll’s message had lost its nuance. It took days to appear, delivered by salting the grass under the cover of darkness. In the spring of 1991 America had just finished consuming its first reality show, Operation Desert Storm, which took place in Iraq, a country populated by brown people with Arabic names. It looked very sandy on TV. The operation’s name even had sand in it. 

If you were in high school in America at the time, you probably told or heard jokes about the bombing causing no real damage, seeing as how there was nothing there of value to ruin. Iraq was already a shithole. That’s where shithole people come from. America won the Cold War. We were the good guys. The Soviet Union was falling apart. The bad guys now came from places like that.

Anyway, when you have an Arabic name, that tends to come up in conversation a lot more when America is involved in an active Middle East conflict. The country itself doesn’t matter. They were all the same. Sandy shitholes that needed to become glass parking lots for Walmarts.

My family wasn’t from Iraq, and we’re barely religious at all. But we loved to overeat, hang wreaths and lights, throw parties and send Christmas cards each year, which could have been construed as a convenient cover to suspicious people who didn’t want to believe that anyone, regardless of complexion, could be “normal.”

No one wants to be proven wrong, which is how conspiracies flourish. Inconvenient details get swallowed by an unrelenting belief or blind emotion. I have Allah in my last name. It’s inescapable. That’s the only detail that mattered.

I was 17, angry for my parents and felt guilty for causing it to happen (because adults wouldn’t do this, right?) but I didn’t feel any personal sadness. That type of harassment stopped bothering me in grade school when I first learned of an Eleanor Roosevelt quote that was posted on my homeroom wall: No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

That was freeing. The mailbox thief and swastika artist didn’t have my consent. The kids who called me A-Rab at recess during tag or touch football in grade school didn’t have my consent. The authors of the notes that were bravely slipped into the vents of my locker in high school that had words like yard ape, camel jockey, sandnigger and Ramzy Ayatollah scribbled on them didn’t have my consent. 

They were just love letters from secret admirers. It was flattering. Some people have to actually try to inspire others. I was boring and did nothing to command the attention I was getting. 

A new patch of sod was installed around the mailbox and my parents eventually replaced the wooden post version with a brick one. They had arrived in the United States in the early 1970s from Beirut. Mailbox vandalism? They were basically like lol, try harder.

I eventually found out who the mailbox guy was. His girlfriend had been cordial with me, which was unacceptable. I also inadvertently discovered who one of those locker vent note authors was when I noticed his imitable handwriting in a class, a dead-on match. 

That one did bother me. Eleanor couldn’t stop it. He had always been friendly; we had even had lunch together. I was never brave enough to approach him and say, “hey Chris…Yard Ape? Really?”

Getting harassed for being brown wasn’t a big secret among my friends. They usually expressed embarrassment and tried to show empathy, however awkward it might have been for them. They wanted to talk through it. They couldn’t understand why I, in particular, was taking the abuse, since I was one of the good ones. 

One of the good ones. 

I have heard this expression all my life. It was a compliment during the Gulf War and then again after 9/11, two tough periods where people with funny brown names were guilty by association. Ramzy is cool, actually. He writes about sports. He’s more American than you are. He’s one of the good ones.

Being called good feels good. The opposite of Eleanor’s quote is equally true - no one can make you feel good without your consent, either. Everyone had my consent. Not having your guard up against flattery isn’t weird.

But plenty of vetting goes into being deemed one of the good ones. Having immigrant parents who came here and thrived for decades was a decent start. They tried hard enough and assimilated; good, good. We all dressed well. They were self-made. Everyone in our family obsesses over speaking in flawless, untainted English (my sister and I even majored in it). None of us are troublemakers. Good ones!

That’s how immigrants and their immediate descendants generally roll. This is the safest bet in America. It does not matter where they’re coming from. They carry the same intentions. We are a nation of immigrants became a bumper sticker at some point, but it’s important to remember what went into making it stick.

Few if any people leave one country for another one just to fail or mooch. Poor people hate being poor. The oppressed hate being oppressed. Mediocre people want to improve their lives. For centuries people have come to America to try and get better. 

Regardless, there are many Americans whose position on immigration is that they only want the good ones. They want people who are doing well and living their best lives. Those people don’t emigrate; they globe-trot. The ones America gets on a permanent basis are trying to get better, because everything is possible for them here. 

That’s why my parents uprooted everything to become Americans, which they’ve now been far longer than they weren’t. That’s probably what your parents did too. If not, it was their parents. If not, just keep going back in time until it’s true. Someone you were related to showed up here from somewhere else. It might have even been a shithole.

And the good ones can come from anywhere, even shitholes. Try to pass the red-face test arguing against that. You will fail. America takes all bets, and most of them pay off handsomely. People get better here, they make more of themselves, they elevate their communities and that upgrades the country.

Dark-skinned immigrants come from shithole countries and dark-skinned Americans come from shithole counties are two firm beliefs racists have always held; they’re just a little less nuanced about communicating these days. They don’t have to knock mailboxes off their posts anymore to send their message.

Whenever someone emerges from an artificially predetermined shithole destiny, they get to be one of the good ones too. I’m a little slow, but I finally figured out that’s what that backhanded compliment really meant. I know you meant well, because I didn’t do 9/11 or like Saddam Hussein and I always rooted for the home team, not the clearly evil people who had names sort of like mine. 

They were a few people out of several billion. The good ones outnumber the bad ones. It’s not even close. And that’s because people are born good. 

Every single pretty and ugly baby begins its journey on a good path. We’re all the good ones, at least once. A few of us do get poisoned along the way. Unfortunately, they tend to get emboldened and believe they’re the good ones, and they choose to redefine good as being like them. This is the core principle of racism. It’s literally skin-deep.

Good humans have a disparate presentation. There are more flavors of good people that we can process, and you see this every time we marvel at a feel-good story that goes viral and defies belief. A young black man and an old white woman play Words with Friends together! Hoboken elected a man with a turban to be its mayor, and he’s graceful and empathetic! How is this even possible?

Anyway, the latest dispatch from the White House regarding shithole countries caused me to remember that mailbox I fixed a few dozen times back in high school, which will always remind me of Eleanor Roosevelt. We’re emotional beings. Consent means everything if sanity means anything. 

So whenever someone says or does something that’s incomprehensibly dumb, mean or tone deaf, we own the consent to what impact that has on us. And maybe - even if you’re just trying to be nice - try to remember that nobody has a predetermined shithole destiny. You don’t need to congratulate anyone for overcoming something that doesn’t uniformly exist.