Many blacks of this time were simply tired
of what had happened during enslavement,
the Civil War, and its aftermath.
They wanted a place to start afresh,
a place where history and skin color
meant less than skill and ability.
That place was the American West.
(narrator) It was the era
of cattle drives and cowboys,
gold rushes and miners,
homesteading and settlers.
It was the period colorfully referred to
in American history as "the Wild, Wild West."
And blacks participated fully
in the settling of this untamed wilderness.
At the close of the Civil War, the last frontier of America
beckoned to many who were tired of war and politics.
They headed west of the Mississippi,
bound for places with exotic names like El Dorado,
Deadwood, Santa Fe, and Tombstone.
They headed for a land rich in timber,
grasslands, and minerals.
For the black person, the West was a place
where their ability meant more than the color of their skin.
To former slaves, the West was a place to start over.
Blacks fanned out across the West to New Mexico, Arizona,
California, Oregon, Washington, Kansas, Nebraska,
Colorado, and the Dakotas and Montana.
They worked side by side with whites as farmers,
miners, oilmen, merchants, bankers,
lumberjacks, and seamen.
And they were sheriffs, such as Bass Reeves,
who was one of the most successful lawmen
in the late 19th century,
working for the legendary "Hanging Judge," Isaac Parker.
During the Indian Wars,
the 9th and 10th Cavalry Regiments,
known as the Buffalo Soldiers,
earned great respect as cavalry troops
on the western frontier.
But the profession that epitomized
what the settling of the West meant for blacks,
after 2 1/2 centuries of enslavement,
was the cowboy.
As cowboys, blacks could experience freedom
in ways they never had before.
Of the 35,000 men who worked on trail drives and on ranches,
nearly 8,000 were black.
Former slaves like the famous cowboy Nat Love
learned to read brands, rope, and shoot,
and, in Love's case, earned an appealing nickname.
Love became known as Deadwood Dick
after his exploits in Deadwood, South Dakota.
But the most remarkable black cowboy
was George McJunkin, known as the Folsom Cowboy.
Born a slave on a ranch in Midway, Texas, in 1851,
after emancipation, he worked cattle drives,
finally ending up in the Cimarron Valley of New Mexico.
He became foreman of the Crowfoot Ranch,
managing a white and Hispanic crew.
However, George was not only a cowboy
but also a self-taught naturalist
in the tradition of Darwin,
Thoreau, and Audubon, also a black man.
In this place, near Folsom, New Mexico, in 1908,
George McJunkin made one of the most startling discoveries
in all of archaeology.
He found a spearpoint
embedded in a 10,000-year-old buffalo fossil.
With this discovery, later called the Folsom Point,
George McJunkin had proved that humans had lived side by side
with mastodons and mammoths
on the North American continent
5,000 years earlier than anyone had ever thought.
George died peacefully, surrounded by his many friends,
on January 21, 1922.