Trails and Tribulations: Club Extols Past of Black Cowboys

CHULA VISTA —  Just north of Main Street, as it leaves Chula Vista, is the West. The True West. Not the West of Will Rogers and Tom Mix and Hollywood’s blow-dried blond gauchos.

This is the Wild Woolly West of the guys who actually tamed this neck of the woods way back when. The guys whose kinky hair and bravery earned them the name “Buffaloes” among cavalry cohorts and Indians alike, back when the new territories were really wild.

And these whooping horsemen roaring down toward Main Street now are their spiritual descendants. The dust is spurting from the hoofs of a dozen horses. Ponies are doing vertical leaps looking for their mamas. Dogs dash among their hoofs yelping like hounds of the hunt. Guinea-fowl squawk and scatter as the posse bursts upon them.

“Stay together! Stay together,” yells Calvin Holt, the oldest cowboy, from the porch of a shack. As the posse rushes by, all of the kids and wives nearly knock Holt over as they scramble onto the wooden porch out of the way, then burst out laughing.

“This is us,” Holt says. “We’re folk with a mission--but man we’re having fun doing it.”

The folk with the mission are the Black Cowboys of Southern California. They’re a loosely knit group that has gotten the idea that the cowboys among their forefathers haven’t been dealt a fair deal by history.

They also just plain love fooling around with horses. They like using that love to give a good experience to a lot of inner-city kids who have hardly gotten to know another living thing that wasn’t either cat, dog or television.

They also tell these kids about their forefathers, the black guys who did maybe more of the leg work of winning the West than anyone else.

The best time to get the low-down is first thing on a weekend morning, when the hard core are already up and out at “the ranch” on the hill beside the little old pencil-yellow Woodland Park Church of God in Christ. That used to be the only building in sight. But today, they’re on the edge of the urban tidal wave of Chula Vista.

New houses awkwardly dot canyons all around, even though there’s a lot of dust and not many footpaths, yet.

Look west and you think you’re in the suburbs. Look east and you’re in the country. Look around and you’re in the dusty middle of a corral straight out of frontiersville. Not cutely so. Just by its dusty simplicity.

Its dogs, colts and fillies wander ‘round unfettered, its low-slung, unpainted wooden lean-tos sprawl with comfortable porches and shade and chairs where chewing the fat takes priority, and quality of life is Job One. The buildings were put up by the club’s old-timers over the past 15 years.

These stables are the direct opposite of those classy stables where nags and stabling alone cost the price of a new car every year.

In this place, all the guys pay is the food and utilities--a basic $40 per horse. The rest they do themselves. Labor of love. Even the horses, when they bought them, were free.

The horses don’t wear shoes here, but that doesn’t mean they are down and out. Just that they never use the roads. These are some of the most heavily loved horses in the Southland.

Right now though, the guys are out there with the shovels. They’re filling up a trailer with manure to take to the dump because they can’t find anybody to buy it as fertilizer. Horses apparently leave weed seeds alive and well in their manure. So when you put it on your garden, everything grows--everything.

Irungu Adeyemi is waiting to hop into the driver’s seat. This guy is straight out of the movies. Highly curled straw hat, blue bandanna, blue shirt, brown chaps, Humphrey Bogart eyes, and nothing of the dude cowboy whatsoever. Friends have abandoned his Ethiopian name for Ted.

You expect to hear a Texan cow-puncher’s drawl when he speaks, but there he reveals his other life. He has a law degree. He’s a teacher. At Ira Harbison School in National City, he “demands excellence”--and gets it. His sixth-grade class, a mixture of Anglo, Filipino, Hispanic, black and Vietnamese students, carries the highest test scores in its district, he says.

George Hill, the cowboy next to him, is the regional vice president of A.L. Williams Insurance Services.

Dan Bembry, next to him, is a licensed vocational nurse at the Hillcrest mental health facility.

They’re all guys with heavy jobs. This is obviously where the steam gets let off. Where they can get back in touch, where they can work effectively for black consciousness, and help out kids, too.

“This is not some alienation movement to separate black cowboys from the rest, or black kids from the rest,” says Adeyemi, who is part Cherokee. “It’s a consciousness thing. We want to teach black kids about what their ancestors really did: teach the Anglos how to break horses, introducing steer wrestling and bulldogging and basic ideas of the rodeo. We want them to know that the 9th and 10th Cavalry did more than its share in winning the West, that they were known as the “Buffalo Soldiers” out of respect.

“Geronimo said if he ever surrendered, it would be to the Buffaloes because with them he wouldn’t be killed before he got to a fair trial, and they were worthy enemy to surrender to.

“We want these kids to know we and the Indians were the ones who knew how to treat horses properly. We never used spurs, or rough bits, or whips. We didn’t just use the horse either, burn them out like many of the Anglos. We valued them as living things worthy of respect, not tools.”

Adeyemi looks at his friends. They have heard all this many times, but they still listen and nod approval.

Only Calvin Holt and Louis Monteilh are left when the manure brigade takes off for the dump. When Holt was transferred out here years ago by the Navy, his parents and family came after him. They bought the little house that’s still here, and he and his brother Leroy bought this little patch of land surrounding it when it was just coyotes and jack rabbits.

They’re sitting under a veranda, looking out at the dusty corral and a couple of stunted pepper trees that give the dogs and colts a bit of shade.

“I’d always liked horses,” the wiry 59-year-old Holt said. “We used to go down to Mexico to hire horses near Rosarito, 25 cents an hour it was then. Then one day, my brother and I decided ‘Why not buy a couple and put them with Mom and Dad?’ So we did. From Indians outside Rosarito Beach. Twenty dollars. They even drove them up for that!”

Monteilh is a big shambling man from Louisiana, who sits surprisingly neatly in the saddle. He’s a 42-year-old with a beautifully kind face and a union organizer for the American State, County and Municipal Employees, a million-strong union, who remembers hard times in Le Beau, La.

“The reason so many blacks are good with horses to this day is that we continued using mules and horses while the white farmers got cars and tractors. We couldn’t afford them. My grandfather used horses to pull cotton gins and for plowing. I had horses around me all my childhood.”

It was Monteilh and Holt who had the idea of using horses to help city kids and to spread the truth about the role of black cowboys.

In 1982, they took advantage of the government Bureau of Land Management’s offer to give away wild Mustangs in Lancaster, north of Los Angeles.

“They cost us $125 vet’s fees each. That was it,” Holt said.

“Of course, they were wild, unbroken,” Monteilh added. “It took us two months to break them.”

Two months?

“Well, that’s our way, you see. We didn’t want to beat them into submission. We wanted to gain their confidence. The relationship is important to us. Kids can ride these horses now. We did it step by step. Blankets, saddles, the bit, then a long spell with a sack of dirt on the back. And they have taught us so much.

“These Mustangs are the horses the Spaniards set free,” Monteilh continued. “They are very smart. They know how to survive. They protect themselves. They never eat too much. They know they’ve got to stay fit to be able to escape any time. They’re not fussy, either. Years in the desert taught them to eat anything that grew. They’re the ideal trail horse.”

They have been good for the city kids, too. Since 1982, about 50 to 60 kids have been brought out and taught to ride.

“The goal is to get them to ride bareback,” Monteilh says, “to get the feel of the horse. If they can move with a horse with nothing artificial between them, then they’ve really learned something. And while we’re teaching them to ride, we’re telling them about their forefathers, things that make them feel proud about who they are.”

“Yes,” Holt says. “We were always the front line in the West. We handled the horses. We did the hard, dirty work because we were better at getting hurt than they were. To them (whites), horses were tools. They valued cattle more because cattle was money. They weren’t horsemen, they were cattlemen. But the Indians, they were horsemen because they concerned themselves with the horse.”

It was Adeyemi who brought the historical perspective with him when he got involved. His special interest in history at college was the Afro-American role in the West. The first thing he noticed was the blanks where the black cowboy should have been credited and studied.

It was he who emphasized the importance of telling the kids that their forefathers were a part of the history of the West, “not slaves, pioneers.” He scoured university libraries to fill in the gaps that the general histories left, and with Monteilh, he came up with such names as James Beckworth, a scout and trailblazer over the Sierra Nevada in the middle of the 19th Century; the warrior Geronimo and the respect he reserved for the Buffalo units of the Calvary, and about Bill Pickett, the first black elected to the Cowboy Hall of Fame.

Then, with each kid who came along, as they taught him about horses, they’d drip in bits of black cowboy history--nuggets to strengthen a sense of pride about where they really came from, what many of their forebears had really done.

“All through school, we only got the smallest mentions of the black cowboy,” says Dunham, one of the youngest of the four members at 26. “But now, since Ted and Louis, I’m sure this happened. It’s a very good feeling.”

“We aim to get things right by the year 2000,” Monteilh said. “We want to put stuff together for the history books to balance things up.”

Suddenly, the guys are back, bouncing up in the communal truck that transports horses, people, gear--and the manure. Visitors who have been invited for the day are clinking out armloads of blankets and saddles. The colts rush in for a comforting suck of milk from their mothers.

One of the young cowboys leads kids around on Dandy, a wicked 10-year-old Shetland who’s main job is teaching the young colts and fillies how to escape up to the grasses beyond the church.

“J.D.!” someone calls.

Jerry Dunham looks around. A horse comes whinnying up. Everyone laughs. It’s a constant problem. The horse’s name is J.D. too.

Ralph Cook is a 32-year-old supervisor for a janitorial company. He’s out here every day, just about.

“Before, I used to do a lot of running around. Picking up chicks. Now, I only pick up chicks who love horses as much as I do.”

It took him a while to get the feel for horses. He learned from scratch. He fell, he was trod on, he injured his back when his horse and he fell together down a canyon.

“But like they say, each time you fall, get back on. I bring my two kids down regularly to ride Dandy now.”

Three kids watch the saddling up. Penny, who is 6, stands back a bit from Nibbles as the saddle goes up and over. “I’m scared to ride them, so people walk me.”

“I think they’re kind of fun,” Regina, 7, said. “I fell off one.”

What do they want to be when they grow up?

“Cowgirls!”

Bembry says, “Kids, everyone, learn release from animals. They can give so much love. They can touch without feeling threatened. That’s what’s so great about this.”

“Hey,” Dunham says from atop his horse, “what’s so great is to see the kind of respect we get when they see us. We’re breaking through--people see us, and they begin to know what we represent.”

“The best thing,” Adeyemi says, “is the envy in the eyes of some guy with a fancy $20,000 four-wheel-drive, which looks great--till you see a man on a horse.”

“OK!” Bembry yells, “Let’s go! Come on everyone. Let’s ride!”

Henry the German shepherd barks his agreement. He goes on every ride. He keeps the ponies in control. Gradually, they all assemble in a fuzz of dust.

“Hey!” Holt shouts from the veranda, “Go turn out that yearling. Let her go along and learn the trail.”

Someone goes and releases the filly. She goes mad for a moment, then she races off to be near her mother.

“Stay together!” Holt shouts, and the posse of dogs, ponies, horses and their grateful masters takes off for the culvert under Main Street, the tunnel to the freedom of the last trail around here, up to Otay Mesa.

Even that will probably go as Chula Vista sprawls. But Adeyemi already has eight acres out east of El Cajon in the Dehesa Valley. No city sprawl is going to spoil this fun. The Black Cowboys of Southern California are going to make good and sure of that.