When I read accounts of the Old West I know that all kinds of people lived there. Native tribes married with trappers, the Spanish had often got there early and the Mexicans were in the south, the white cowboys and woodsmen must have been tanned to leather from the wind and sun, and former slaves spread out and made an honest living by hard work, soldiering and women’s work. I’m more interested in learning about women’s lives since men seem to have cornered the market on film and book reconstructions. So I’m delighted that BLACK HEROES OF THE WILD WEST is a graphic novel which places Stagecoach Mary firmly where she belongs in the canon.

Mary Fields was born as a slave girl and in later life became famous as Stagecoach Mary, but first she distinguished herself in other ways. We get a fantastic photo of Mary, seated in a fine chair, looking down and holding a rifle. This strong lady started her working life on a Tennessee plantation in the 1830s, travelled after Black Emancipation and worked on a paddle steamer, built a mission in Montana Territory, ran a restaurant; and by her speedy hitching of a team of horses, won the right to be a stagecoach driver on the Star Route – the first African American and the second woman to do so. Her dedication to reliability then made her legendary, although she did this work during the 1890s when age must have been catching up to her.

Other heroes of frontier life featured are Bass Reeves, the first black Deputy US Marshal west of the Mississippi, and Bob Lemmons, a one-man mustanger. Lemmons lived to be 99 years old and earned the money for his own ranch by riding alongside herds of wild mustangs on the plains of Texas until they trusted him enough to follow him – into a corral, but unhurt.

What this entertaining graphic novel created by James Otis Smith seems to be saying, with the lively stories and the historical photos, newspaper and playbill content at the end, is that many people who were hardworking and enterprising found the room to live their own way and help the society in which they lived. The three BLACK HEROES OF THE WILD WEST featured are placed in context and we learn the facts and figures about the large number of African American cowboys, something seldom shown in the Western films. I very much enjoyed this read, and I can recommend the content for family discussion or any classroom studying American history.