This  is another story of the black forntier, about black cowboys of the old west, acording to Lillian Schlissel:

One of the best bronco riders of all times was Ned Huddleston.  No man in the country understood horeses better the {he} did" . No rider' ever threw a leg over a horse."

Huddleston was born a slave in Arkansas in 1849.  At sixteen he ran away and joined a rodeo in Mexico, where he learned to be a stunt rider and a clown.  A rodeo clown is hired to make the adiuence laugh, but his most important job is to protect a cowboy who has fallen off the horse.  I takes daring and skill to draw off an angry bull from a cowboy who is hurt on the ground.

Ne was a natural.  he could saddle a horse when no other man could come near it.  Rodeo riders said they had see Ned talk to horses on occasion it was also said he talked a horse away form its owner. When Huddleston came back to the United States, he tried mining, but white men were almost always stealing whatever gold a blck man found.

He joined some thieves known as The Gault Gang.  They would stampede a herd of horses and ride off with as many as they could get to follow them.   The owner of one herd laid an ambush at the rustler"s camp, and when the thieves returned, he and his men killed every single one.  When Ned came back to the hideout , he saw bodies of his friends.

It was a sobering sight.  After emptying their money belts, he gave each man a decent burial. When night fell, Ned worried that the men who killed the gang might come back for him, and so he slipped into one of the new graves and spent the nigh next to a dead man. In the light of morning, Ned got on a train headed Oklahoma.

When he got off the train, he changed his name to Isom Dart( sometimes Isham) Dart and decided it was time to go straight.  Yet, whether his name was Ned Huddleston or Isom Dart, Ned didn't exactly change his ways.  He found a new gang and went on living by a little larceny of livestock.  In other words, he stole a few more horses.

It wasn't long before Isom Dart was arrested.  One the way to jail. the sheriff's horse bolted, the Bucboard turned over, and the sheriff's leg was broken. Now Isom may have been a horse theif, but he was also a kindheaarted man. He caught the horses, righted the buchboard, took the sheriff to a doctor, and turned himself in athe local jail.

When Isom Dart came to trial, the all white jury said he was an honest man, an they st him free. Dart went to work breaking wild horses.  That meant getting them to tolerate a bridle and saddle.  People who watched him work  began to call him "The Black Fox".  After years of hard work, Ned Huddleston finally saved enough money to buy his own ranch.  But just as Ned --Or Isom  was settling down, a paid killer named Tom Horn began hunting that use to been horse rustlers.

Ned was going straight and paid little attention to warnings , but one day, as he stepped out of the door of his own cabin, he was gunned down .  How should Ned Huddleston be remembered?. As one of the best bronco riders in the West? or as a horse thief and rustler?. Perhaps the should be thought of as a superb horseman, a black cowboy with a good heart, a man who loved wild horses and life just a little outside of the law.

Benny Faye Douglass