The Real Wild West
American History Hit
History Hit
4.3 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 23 October 2023
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Clint Eastwood, Robert Redford, John Wayne. We've seen them roping and wrangling and defeating their enemies, all by the time the credits role.
But what was the role of cowboys in the real wild west? What was the role of black men in this industry? And how have they been erased in popular culture?
In this episode, Don speaks first with Roger Hardaway, professor of history at Northwestern Oklahoma State University. Roger has written and researched extensively on the American West, and is the co-editor of African Americans on the Western Frontier.
Don is then joined by Tony Warner, founder of Black History Walks and co-founder of the African Odysseys programme, to talk about how the inclusion of black people on the screen has evolved.
Produced and edited by Sophie Gee. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's a busy evening in town tonight. Barmen serving up whiskey to cow hands fresh home from the drive, pockets full of pay. |
| 0:10.0 | The undertakers got paid too, and they've got a bottle down there at the end of the bar. |
| 0:15.0 | And there's those outlaws at the poker table ready to duck out the back. |
| 0:19.0 | All of them crowd in the place while the piano man pounds on his keys, accompanied by the jangle of boot spurs and the percussion of shot |
| 0:26.2 | glasses pounding. Trailtails are told. Casey's horse got spooked by a rattler, landed |
| 0:32.3 | him on the back of a bull who took none too kindly. |
| 0:34.8 | Bo lost his boots on a wager and walked clear back to camp in cactus. |
| 0:40.0 | Everyone's laughing in high spirits as drinks flow and music plays until... |
| 0:45.0 | It's a newcomer in town, squinting his eyes adjusting to the light. |
| 0:51.0 | A man who doesn't belong, not in this room at least. Yet he |
| 0:56.6 | sure seems to think he does. Spiteful eyes shoot darts. Others look down at the |
| 1:02.1 | floor. The air is suddenly tense and seething. Looks |
| 1:06.4 | like we're heading for trouble in town tonight. The confrontation here at the |
| 1:12.3 | showdown saloon. Welcome listeners to American History Hit. I'm Don Wildman glad you're with us. |
| 1:28.0 | On today's episode, we discuss a central element of the American West, a mythological character passed down through the ages or certainly through |
| 1:36.9 | about a thousand movies and TV shows and dog-eared Louis Lamour novels that of the |
| 1:42.4 | American cowboy and how the popular |
| 1:44.7 | history of the Old West has twisted the facts about him, morphing the |
| 1:48.4 | historic truths into an image much more useful and comfortable to the mass market. |
| 1:53.0 | Of course, this is generally true of most Western tales and how they've been told, |
| 1:57.0 | and we've been course correcting for decades now as a culture. |
| 2:00.0 | But the cowboy has mostly been excluded from this conversation, out there alone on his horse on the dusty plains of our collective memory. |
... |
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