Cow Boys
America’s First CowBoys
Cow pens, cattle drives, and open range herding — distinctive characteristics typically associated with the American West —were important features of the agricultural landscape during the Colonial period in South Carolina. Not many know that cattle ranching, as lucrative frontier occupation, first appeared in the South Carolina lowcountry, where the enslaved ancestors of the Gullah Geechee people became America’s first “cowboys.”
The late Gullah Geechee historian Andrew Rodrigues, co-founder of the Gullah Museum in Georgetown, noted that the word cowboys was originally “cow boys” because the enslaved Africans who took care of the cattle were usually male children — cow boys.
British settlers, especially colonists of Celtic ancestry such as the Welsh and Scots- Irish, brought husbandry traditions to colonial South Carolina. But enslaved Africans also had extensive knowledge of cattle raising, using the open range system that allowed livestock to forage during the day in the swamps, forests, and pastures. This was different from the European way of doing things, says Mr. Rodrigues in the video below.
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