A former slave who became a cowboy, a rancher, and a Texas legend
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Submitted 1 year ago by bot@lemmy.smeargle.fans [bot] to hackernews@lemmy.smeargle.fans
autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] 1 year ago
This is the best summary I could come up with:
As early as the 1840s, Black men who were enslaved rounded up free-range Longhorns on the plains west of Houston and drove them north across Indian Territory to Kansas, establishing Texas’s fabled cattle-drive era.
He contended with thunderstorms, blizzards, droughts, dust storms, outlaw gangs, poisonous snakes, disease, infection, sunstroke, lack of food and water, stampedes, and skirmishes with Native Americans.
“I got a sense of what my great-grandfather’s life on the cattle ranges was like from reading about Joshua Deets.” Deets was the much-respected Black cowboy portrayed by Danny Glover in the TV rendition of Larry McMurtry’s novel.
“Even now, in 2024, a lot of people aren’t aware of how diverse cowboy culture was,” says Robert Tidwell, interim director of collections, exhibits, and research at Texas Tech’s National Ranching Heritage Center, in Lubbock.
Realizing he needed to learn how to read and write before he could become a successful rancher, he enrolled as a second grader at a segregated Black school in Navarro County, almost three hundred miles east of his newly acquired land.
It’s said that around the time Wallace made that mail trip on Blondie, he sank a post in the sandy loam on his property and announced he wanted to be buried at that exact spot.
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