Politicians, pundits and historians are engaged in fierce, and growing, debates over the impact of race and racism on American development and, more generally, the value of meaningful, honest history for democracy.
Black history and Black studies have been central to these “history wars.” In January, Florida rejected a new Advanced Placement African American Studies class, arguing it violated state law and lacked educational value — just the latest salvo in this intensifying fight. In some ways, the intensity and coordination of the attacks seem unprecedented.
But for historians of the North American West, the moment feels quite precedented. The West has always been a site of fierce battles over historical facts and popular mythology, and that is particularly true when it comes to the long histories of Black people in this region.
One of the most persistent myths about American history, in fact, is that the stories of Black Westerners are mostly insignificant, curious novelties or disconnected from “authentic” regional histories of the West. In our popular culture, Black history is often depicted as peripheral to the development of the American West before the mid-20th-century rise of western cities. This version of the western past singularly incorporates White settlers and their goals.
Paramount’s hit “Yellowstone,” starring Kevin Costner, along with its prequels “1883” and “1923,” are just a few examples of a popular western narrative that perpetuates this myth. Even as the Black West has grown into a vibrant subfield of study, its insights usually clash with these popular narratives. Too often, Black Westerners are simply ignored or reduced to bit parts in the “real” western drama.
But that’s historically inaccurate, and in a time of resurgent mythologies and “history wars,” correcting our understanding is indispensable to a fully honest exploration of the American past and a more inclusive society in the present.
Consider the remarkable history of Cheyenne, Wyo.
Within a few years of the city’s founding in 1867, hundreds of Black residents settled there. Many arrived as employees of the Union Pacific Railroad or sought work as laborers in other industries. They fashioned vibrant social lives, organized to secure social and political recognition, and went about imagining and building a future in the West.
Black residents of Cheyenne took part in every aspect of civic life. Numerous political clubs capitalized on Black access to the vote — in Wyoming, Black men could vote before the 15th Amendment following the 1867 Territorial Suffrage Act, and Wyoming’s Black women were the first in the nation to win suffrage in 1869. Residents established the first African Methodist Episcopal Church in Wyoming in 1876, and throughout the 1870s and 1880s, the city boasted several prosperous Black-owned businesses, such as Barney Ford’s resplendent Inter-Ocean Hotel.
Black settlers kept arriving throughout the late 19th century, weathering lean years, economic panics and persistent racism from White residents. By 1900, Black Cheyenne was well established, thanks to migrants from the East, South and nearby Denver.
In the first decade of the 20th century, Cheyenne’s population plummeted as hopeful men who had arrived in 1899 to work on the expanding railroads confronted a high cost of living and depressed local economy. By 1910, thousands of laborers had moved on. Yet, the Black population of Cheyenne actually grew, buoyed by the strength of the relatively dense community and its small, Black-owned businesses, such as barber shops, groceries and restaurants.
When economic conditions improved in the 1910s, wealthy Black residents managed to buy property outside of the Black district on the west side of the city. For instance, Albert Taylor, a successful barber, bought multiple lots just north of the main Black neighborhood and set up an enclave eventually known as Taylorsville.
By 1910, Cheyenne had 726 Black residents, the largest Black population per capita in the Mountain West (nearly 7 percent). Yet, it wasn’t the only unexpected Western city with a thriving Black population. In Montana, Butte, Great Falls and Helena all boasted large Black communities. In Idaho, Utah and Colorado, towns such as Pocatello, Ogden, Boulder, Colorado Springs and Pueblo all enjoyed steady Black growth well ahead of the 1920s. Many more thrived in the Southwest and along the West Coast.
All of this came decades before the second Great Migration brought hundreds of thousands of Black migrants west to war industry centers like Oakland and Los Angeles — after which popular representations of the West began to more regularly include Black experiences.
But the stories of Black communities growing in the West long before World War II, including those in Cheyenne, remained hidden. Why?
As Black Cheyenne grew in the early 20th century, a debate arose in local newspapers, classrooms, museums, archives, libraries and historical societies in the region over popular depictions of the West, especially in literature and later in film. In the 1923 inaugural issue of Wyoming’s state history journal, White historian Philip Rollins insisted that “the public be taught that the pictures are inaccurate, that the average Western pioneer was a constructive citizen, a builder of empire, and not a ‘two-gun’ killer.” Similarly, he worried that the nation’s infatuation with the “Wild West” as a space filled with bandits and rogue vigilante gunmen would inevitably attract the “wrong type” of people to Wyoming.
In Cheyenne, such voices insisted that Hollywood producers and dime novel authors — Easterners who wouldn’t know their chaps from a chuck wagon — maligned the “real” history of Wyoming’s settlers. To this end, they wrote scores of local history textbooks and even produced elaborate historical plays and pageants to set the record straight.
But their vision of Western history was also flawed. It completely excluded Black settlers — their own neighbors — from the story, disregarding them and their ancestors as insignificant actors in the tale of the past.
Yet anyone who knew the truth about Wyoming history could see something more sinister in their insistence on centering White experiences. Rollins fretted about the “wrong type” of settler during a time when African Americans flocked to Cheyenne and helped fuel its revival during the 1910s. Other writings and depictions of the past further suggested that to be a part of Wyoming’s future, one needed to know and conform to its history of peaceful and productive White settlers.
Excluding Black Wyomingites from the history of Cheyenne — despite it being home to one of the largest Black communities in the West, one with deep historical roots — was a way of defining who belonged in the community and who had the right to claim place and power by virtue of their history.
This case illuminates why telling the full story of our past is important. It’s not just about inserting Black stories into narratives of the past that have omitted them. It’s about understanding that the battles over our history — whose story gets excluded, and who shapes the narratives — is designed to shape our communities in the present. The battle in Cheyenne in the 1920s wasn’t about Wyoming’s past. It was about Wyoming’s present and who got to claim membership in its civic and political fabric.
This is precisely why reinserting Black western history is about so much more than historical accuracy. It's a tool for rejecting exclusion in the present, and enabling Black Westerners to see themselves as belonging while also refusing the harmful mythologies that implicitly argue they don’t.
Understanding how Black settlements in places in like Cheyenne came to fly below the radar help explicate the role that race has played in crafting the durable mythologies and other narratives that define who “belongs” in a community and nation. The West has always been a site of contested historical memory. The disavowal of Black Cheyenne, therefore, has a history.