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The cook was usually one of the oldest people on the trail, often a superannuated cowboy who could no longer take the rigors of the saddle. He was a man of trust, because in addition to the food and water supplies and the medicine kit, the cowboys’ personal possessions often rode in the wagon. The cook, whether white or black, was the complete ruler of his domain. Not surprisingly, black cowboy cooks had to tread lightly in the mid-nineteenth-century minefield of racial mores. Yet, even black cowboy cooks retained a degree of autonomy. For them, as for any trail cook, transgression of their authority was not tolerated, and retribution could be swift and was always unpleasant, whether the crew member was white or black. A disrespectful cowhand might find that the cook had taken revenge in any number of ways, from cold coffee to a lost bedroll to a gristle-laden meal.

Although often a trail-hardened type, the cook served as doctor and dentist, father confessor and surrogate mother to the crew. The cook had to know how to forage for wild greens along the trail and also how to dress and roast the small game that might be hunted along the way. He also had to understand how to build a fire just so, ensuring that it would cook his meals evenly and wouldn’t blow sparks back onto the wagon and set it ablaze. The cook, sometimes called cosi (short for the Spanish cocinera, meaning cook), had to be a master of outdoor cooking and judge where to place the sharply pointed irons that held the spits over the flames as well as man the Dutch ovens, skillets, and griddles. The cook’s job was to tend to the crew, and a happy crew made a cook a treasure. There were trail roundup cooks who manned chuck wagons on the roundups as well as ranch cooks who manned the skillets in a more stationary environment.

Many of the cowboy cooks were like Sam, who remained without a last name, as remembered by John D. Young in J. Frank Dobie’s A Vaquero of the Brush Country. Weighing in at over 220 pounds and at age thirty-five, Sam was a bit too heavy and a tad too old for life in the saddle. But, according to Young,

he always had a cheerful word or cheerful song and seemed to have an affection for every one of us. When we camped in the vicinity of brush every cowboy before coming in would rope a chunk of wood and snake it up to the chuck wagon. That wood always made Sam grinning happy whether he wanted it or not.

Sam worked wonders on the fires he made from the wood the cowboys brought. Whenever the camp lingered long enough in one spot for the cowboys to hunt, Sam provided some of the most “luscious eating” known on the plains. When he had time to barbecue antelope ribs or roast buffalo steaks or wild turkey, the men had what Sam called a “wedding feast”—because it wed dinner and supper. Then the cowboys waited eagerly for Sam to sing out for them to wash their faces, comb their hair, and come and get it “while she’s hot and juicy.”

All black cooks were not as amiable or as talented as Sam. Zeno, a “French Negro” who cooked on the trail in 1872, was noted for keeping his baking soda and his calomel—a white tasteless powder used as a purgative and fungicide—in similar jars, with predictable results. With remarkable understatement, one cowboy recalled, “We were sick a lot, for despite the more than peculiar taste we ate Zeno’s bread.” Ate they did, truly awful grub like Zeno’s calomel-laden biscuits, but also the tasty vittles like Sam’s.

George, at the RL ranch in Montana, was remembered for his delicious pies and biscuits and his kindly way with the cowhands. Gordon Davis, a cook for legendary trail boss Abe Blocker, prefigured a scene from Blazing Saddles when he rode into town on his left wheel ox playing “Buffalo gals, won’t you come out to night” on his fiddle! Jim Simpson, a roundup cook and ranch cook in Wyoming, “really knew how to wrestle Dutch ovens and pots and pans.” Others remain nameless, but in their reminiscences the cowboys remembered the black cooks and their skills, and their meals. They recalled sourdough biscuits