And I don't mean like Jackie Chan in Shanghai Noon. I mean a real Asian-American desperado-type that had some sort of historical significance. Maybe someone from r/westerns knows of some character that fits the description.
I know that most Chinese immigrants were working on the trans-continental railroad and that they generally were not cattlemen by trade, but I searched decently hard and couldn't find much on the interwebs about any badass Asian cowboy/outlaw types at all. Fictional or otherwise.
Apologies if this questions isn't particularly academic, I didn't really know who else to ask other than maybe r/westerns. Thanks for all input, historians of reddit.
In the great expanse that is the American West, I suspect there was at least one Asian-American cowboy during the nineteenth century - the period that is the focus of your question. But finding such an example could prove difficult.
In general, one would not expect Asians to work in this capacity. Tragically, they were a scorned immigrant group, and many laws restricted what Asian immigrants could do to pursue a living. While I have never heard of any laws prohibiting Asian immigrants from working on a ranch, it would difficult to image one being welcomed by other ranch hands representing other ethnic groups.
That said, the one place I would look for Asian-immigrant cowboys would be in Hawaii, where all sorts of Pacific Rim traditions merged in ways that were distinct from the mainland. I do not have Hawaiian sources at my disposal, and a quick search didn't yield anything concrete. Perhaps we will have a Hawaiian historians who will be able to address this possibility.