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Black Cowboys

Cowboys have a drawl that goes beyond verbal accents and geographical regions. Abstractions like time and weather move differently around them, and those around them. The air out here at the stables moves slowly. The smell of horse manure hangs on every droplet of fog so that it starts to develop a tangible quality of its own. The dogs, of the sheep-herder-mutt variety, have a drawl that makes them act like cats-they approach, sniff and slowly move away. None of the jumping around, "do ya wanna play?" semblance here. It looks like a movie set, but it's real, and these cowboys are like nothing most city folk knew existed.

This Oakland stable, Wildcat Canyon Ranch, is run by Kenneth "Sonny" Wesley, a black cowboy, or an "African American horseman," as he calls himself. This is 1996, so he doesn't materialize out of the fog on a blazing stallion like in the movies, but roars up the pathway in an early '70s lime-green pickup truck. He's tall and lanky as a cowboy should be, with the regulation cowboy hat, boots and quiet demeanor that accessorize quite well with his stable.

Sonny's originally from Louisiana, where he was exposed to horses through his family. "I was more into sports because horses were common to me," he says, remembering summers with his uncle, a horse trainer, and his grandparents, who owned a variety of livestock. In 1965 his family moved to California, and seven years later he made the cowboy connection. By mistake.

Sonny didn't realize there were black cowboys until he stumbled on a black cowboy parade back in 1972. A man named Jule "Mack" Cobb asked Sonny to show him his stuff-to see if he could ride-and became his mentor. Mack was a professional cow pinner, one of a group that demonstrates teamwork by separating designated cows into a corral. Sonny calls Mack a "California cowboy" because of the heavy rodeo influence on cowboys here. "They grow up on rodeo out here, where (Louisiana) presents us as horsemen," he says.

Sonny's migration to California in the early '70s is part of a long history of African Americans moving west in the early 19th century from southern states such as Louisiana, Texas and Oklahoma.

The discovery of gold in the Rocky Mountains in the 1840s opened a market for cattle, and their ranchers. Cowboys followed the beef market as settlers moved west toward Colorado, Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. By 1886, those states' range lands were overcrowded and overgrazed, so ranchers went further west in search of better prospects.

According to professor John Stewart, director of African American studies at the University of California at Davis, three out of every five cowboys who made the trek west were African American. In fact, black cowboys were welcomed into the land that Mexicans founded-now called Los Angeles-and found a respite from the racist honky-tonk towns common in the West. "A lot of us [African Americans] come from a sharecropper's background, which wasn't forgotten when we got to California," Sonny says.

While black cowboys were abundant in Southern California, their move toward the central valley was more economic than exploratory, says Clarence Caesar, of the California Historical Society. "They needed the work and the central valley quickly became prime ranch and farm land."

The Miller and Lux Ranch, named after its owners Henry Miller and Charles Lux, was one of the biggest ranches in the valley during the late 1800s. The ranch encompassed 700,000 acres in the San Joaquin Valley alone, with 350,000 acres in Merced County and 20,000 acres in Gilroy.

Don Clark, owner of D & K stables, knew of the ranch from stories his family told about ancestors who worked there. "It was like a mysterious place to me when I was a kid," he says. "It brought up pictures of a ghost town, with black cowboys riding around. That's basically how I caught the bug," he adds.

Clark and his wife, Kitty Brown, raise, breed and sell horses at their stable. While Clark has cowboy in his blood, Brown is part of a black cowboy renaissance because her previous profession had nothing to do with cowboys. A former schoolteacher, she won third place in the cow pinning competition at the Grand National Rodeo at the Cow Palace, becoming the first African American woman to do so. "It makes me proud because there have been black cowgirls, and winning brings us more recognition," Brown says. Knowing her history has fueled her with strength in an arena where whites don't know- or ignore- the significance African Americans play as cowboys.

Sonny also acknowledges that hurdles still exist. "It's a redneck world full of good ol' boys who aren't used to seeing black people ride the hell out of horses, let alone a black woman," he says. Brown says the racism is worse in California. "People are used to black people with farms in other states. When you think of cowboys now, you think of Texas, Arizona, states like that because California has become so developed," she says.

It's easy to think of California having an abundance of land from a citified or suburbified perspective. Talk to enough cowboys and it's plain to see why there's a bigger rodeo culture out here: there isn't enough space. Sonny's stable is a cowboy oasis in a desert of upper-middle-class, two-income, built-right-on-top-of-each-other homes 1,000 yards away. "In the late 1970s and early '80s, a lot of people went bust," Sonny says as he recalls the real estate boom that can be likened to the Gold Rush in terms of fortune, frenzy and the inevitable decline of the cowboy way of life.

There was a time when there weren't hordes of people in the state. "The military presence created more jobs, which lured more people to the area," says Lawrence DeGraff, a history instructor at California State University, Fullerton. "You had a base, with people within the grounds. Then families moved outside of the base, which created a need for more city services." By the mid-'70s, some developers were keeping an eye on land in Merced and San Joaquin County.

Eileen Beecher is an old timer in Merced, which becomes obvious when she refers to her 70-year-old friends as "boys." "People used to tie up their horses in town to stop off at the post office, barber or whatever, you know?" Beecher says. "Now it's just a shame, all these houses, and for what? You'd be a fool to keep horses and cattle with these guys paying big bucks to tear it down," she added. "They've put the squeeze on everybody."

With ranches and stables suffering from the loss of land and government subsidies, public awareness is increasingly important to keep stables open. Sonny's stable was up to be developed until community support rallied behind him, forcing the city of Oakland to give him a new lease-literally. He developed a youth program to benefit Oakland School District kids and expose them to horses and, inevitably, black cowboys.

"Renegades are guys that do their own thing," he says. Sonny gets nostalgic talking about the old days as he plays the cowboy dozens. "We would make 'The Man from Snowy River' look like nothing," he says. "If you didn't have a fast horse, you couldn't ride with us."

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