Did Cowboys actually exist?

They did, Americans cowboys are straight up copying Spanish vaqueros.

Some of the Indian tribes genuinely were savage though, and I mean that as a descriptor of their actions, not their technological advancement. In much the same way, the US government was on several occasions extremely savage towards Indians. Savage here meaning unnecessarily cruel in disposal of military prisoners, targeting civilians with military action/killing civilians, destroying civilian infrastructure, and performing crimes like rape and torture. None of that carries a moral judgement, i's just a description of actions.

weren't a pretty suprisingly high number of them black?

Let's just agree on this. Both sides were savage in their own right, but the Europeans were better equipped and more effective in conquering the natives.

No one was guiltless and it was generally a pretty shitty time in history

Cowboys existed, but they just herded cattle. Tales of gunslingers were greatly exaggerated, in various Wild West shows. That said, the O.K. Corral and whatnot, was the real deal. Even while the stories of the figures involved are somewhat made up.

Practically the entirety of North and South American aboriginals/natives/indians did not view rights to land in the way Europeans did.

Europeans came from a crowded continent where feudalism prevailed. Land ownership equaled status, and was owned and distributed in very formal patrilineal system. Eventually land was divided so much as to be worthless subsistence plots, forcing younger sons out to venture, soldier, join the clergy, join a guild in a city, or some such. Or, it was gobbled up by the aristocracy/church. Younger sons were fucked, and after a while even the oldest sons wouldn't be getting much.

Saying Indians were nomads and didn't own land is kind of foolish. Land was communal for most groups, no one 'owned' it, because it couldn't really be owned. This was just a "duh" sort of given.

Imagine you're some Indian chief, and some smelly hairy white guys offer you a few rifles, plus a chest full of gunpowder, musket shot, rum and some nice axes, maybe a few pieces of silver. In exchange they want to use the land you're on for some farming or whatever. "Well sure I guess they can plant for a season, me and my buddies hunting over yonder anyway"... Not being able to comprehend 'eternally' giving up 'ownership' of land which they didn't own anyway.

I mean, Indians weren't stupid once they realized whiteys ways, but there was quite a lot of unscrupulous bad faith agreements made by amateurs.

>Say it clearly has a lot of resources and there is no way that the continent is being used to its full potential.
This hypothetical is a false premise.

Clearly you are trying to draw a comparison to North America. The very idea that American aboriginals were not using the land to its "full potential" is ludicrous, not to mention culturally biased and predatory. Natives DID practice extensive farming and modification of the landscape. Forests were cleared with fire to keep bracken and scrub low, to promote the kind of shoots that spring back after a fire. Just the sort of thing game like deer and buffalo love to eat. They weren't 'farmed' as such, but they were controlled. Nut-bearing trees were also extensively managed in groves. Corn, squashes and beans (among other vegetables) were cultivated from the Great Lakes to Central America.

Further, the idea that the Americas were some terra nullius garden of eden just waiting for whitey to show up and make it profitable is both demonstrably false, and excuse-making bullshit often trotted out to make apologia for colonialism.

>humanity needs more resources
No one 'needs' more resources. Colonialism wasn't about survivalist expansion, it was purely about generation of wealth.

Humans act like humans, what a surprise. But yes Europeans and native Americans had different concepts of martial honor and behaviour. Actually, native Americans fought less often to specifically kill and wipe-out everyone. It did happen when stakes were higher, but it was more traditional to take captives (especially more compliant women and children). They didn't have a "winner takes all" concept, but rather short-term score-settling.

Savage is/was a frequently used to describe aboriginals, regardless of context. "Savage" literally means wild and uncivilized. That's why the word was used. Naturally it has negative connotations.

>spent all my childhood romanticizing the cowboys of the amoral, anarchistic wild west
>dreamt about being an outlaw/bounty hunter travelling on my own
>discover that the real west was actually a barren wasteland filled with straneous labor and shitty work conditions for poor cowboys

Why is real life so boring Anons?

At least you could rape Mexican and Indian women without (much) risk of punishment.

No.

Yes, they did. Cowboys specifically refer to cow herders (and usually were boys in their late teens, early 20s) but the frontier life we often think of when we think of the Wild West today did exist, for the most part. Though in reality it was less John Wayne or Clint Eastwood and more Deadwood or Blood Meridian.

A lot of ex-slaves did become Cowboys. Most were poor white dudes, and Mexicans.

Nothing in that video is historically inaccurate. Maybe simplified, but it's less than five minutes long. Cowboy was just a job description, and it was a fairly shitty one at that. They weren't noble heroes, they were just poor people who herded cattle for ranchers. The popular image of the Wild West was created by Buffalo Bill and dime novelists who exaggerated rare events.

>O.K. Corral
The OK Corral has a pretty interesting backstory behind it that pop culture glosses over. Wyatt Earp and his brothers had come to Tombstone (a mining boom town), with the intention of milking money out of the place. Wyatt gambled professionally, and one of his brothers got a job as a marshal so he could arrest competition for the family. The Earps' main competition was a group knows as "The Cowboys" who were legit cowboys, but were also known for rustling cattle and cheating at cards. Both sides were corrupt as fuck, and the gunfight was basically a turf war between two rival gangs.

I used to watch this show a lot. I just may get it on DVD.

>boiling down a complex & intractable issue of the incompatibility between a powerful, growing & restless Western/European society existing next to weak, divided, largely primitive & often nomadic tribesmen into "the bad government invaded their land and killed them"

It's one thing to rightly mention that relationships between Whites & Indians were often fraught with fraud & double dealing (indian giving exists as a phrase to this day), but it does no good from a historical perspective to make blanket moralizations. The way he describes the era its as if whites were animated entirely by unquenchable avarice and bloodlust to destroy the native way of life just because they could.

Fun fact: "buckaroo" comes from "vaquero."
V's are pronounced a lot like B's in Spanish.

do you honestly trust a show that says "they needed protection from us"
yes, cowboys did exist. not as glamorous as in the movies, but they certainly did exist.

nah, it's pretty shit

The word "cowboy" originally meant cattle thief, if you called some farmhand or a cattle driver a cowboy in the 1880s he'd probably kick the shit out of you.

The Cowboys were literally a bunch of semi savage ex-Confederates squatting on a ranch that wasn't theirs and stealing cattle all over the place. They also killed fuck knows how many people in Mexico and the Arizona territory.

Now Earp was corrupt as fuck and a literal pimp but still, the Cowboys were grade A cunts.

Cowboys existed, but "Western" type stuff did not. He's correct in saying that the modern perception of the American West is nothing more than a circus act that was flouted by traveling acts and television shows. The real distinction between the two is that Westerns are built more around the idea of the death of the frontier, while actual cowboys WERE the frontier.

This is hilariously untrue

Where the fuck you read that?

turned off the video when he did started rambling about "unpacking" his comment about natives just lol

they literally were savage, in the uncivilized meaning