Chinese Cowboys: A Story of Resilience in the American Old West

While multiple academic sources point out that the cowboys in the Old West came from various races, most of the scholarship on cowboys of minority races tends to focus on cowboys of Latino, African American, and Native American descent. The topic of cowboys of Asian descent is barely touched upon, and it is not clear whether there were Asian cowboys in the Old West. This paper aims to search for traces of Asian cowboys, primarily Chinese cowboys, in the Old West. Gathering information from old newspapers, academic articles, memoirs, books, and other historical sources, I’m glad to find that Chinese cowboys did exist in the Old West. I’ve put together the stories of some of the most iconic Chinese cowboys from that period, and offered an analysis of the lives and experiences of those Chinese cowboys in the Old West.