Picked this up from Corb Lund:
A Canadian doco, John Ware: Reclaimed, premiered at the Calgary International Film Festival on September 24. The film tells the tale of the Black cowboy who settled in Alberta after landing there in 1882 in the first cattle drive into the region.
Lund said that his family was friendly with Ware in southern Alberta in the early part of the 20th Century.
John Ware and Family.
Ware was exceptionally good at his work, operating two ranches with a thousand head of cattle. He was a legendary horseman, a friend of the famed Siksika First Nation chief Crowfoot, and pioneered irrigation in the region.
Cheryl Foggo created the film, which stars rodeo roping legend Fred Whitfield as John Ware. I saw Whitfield several times at the Sisters Rodeo. He’s a Hall of Famer and it’s cool to see him get this gig.
Matthew says
The west was a lot more diverse than people think it was, wasn’t it?
JimC says
Quite a bit so. Frontiers everywhere tended to be. “Settling” the frontier inevitably led to the establishment of caste systems. Ethnic diversity didn’t go away, but it was subsumed under a powerful European civilizational weight derived from sophisticated organization and technology.
Matthew says
To continue about diversity on frontiers, the Viking settlers in Europe and Asia seem to be of mixed DNA from various races.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/09/viking-was-job-description-not-matter-heredity-massive-ancient-dna-study-shows
It found that the bones in Scandinavia were more homogeneous. Of course, Viking was more of an occupation than anything else. Shades of REH’s Cormac Mac Art sailing with Vikings.
JimC says
There’s no “pure” ethnicity. The desire for such is weird and as we have seen historically, it can be very dangerous.
Matthew says
Off topic, but there making a Fistfull of Dollars tv series.
https://www.cbr.com/fistful-of-dollars-tv-adaptation/