Celebrating Black History Month 2006
The Black West
The American Revolution led to settlement of the Ohio and Mississippi valley. Some Black people arrived as missionaries, others as trappers, schoolteachers, adventurers and runaways. In 1779 Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable built a trading post near a lake in the Illinois territory, married a Potawatomie woman, made friends with Chief Pontiac and Daniel Boone, and his settlement grew into the city of Chicago. Colonel James Stevenson, who lived for 30 years among Native Americans, in 1888 wrote: "The old fur trappers always got a Negro if possible to negotiate for them with the Indians, because of their 'pacifying effect.' They could manage them better than white men, with less friction."

James P. Beckwourth, a handy man with a Bowie knife, gun or hatchet, cut a jagged path from St. Louis to California and back to Florida as a fur trader, army scout and warrior-for-hire. In April 1850 he discovered a pass in the Sierra Nevadas important to the California 49'ers, and Beckwourth pass, a nearby town and a peak still bear his name. In the age of Daniel Boone, Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett, a western writer called Beckwourth "the most famous Indian fighter of this generation."

Thousands of slave runaways lived among the Six Nations of the northeast or the Five Civilized Nations of the southeast. Frontier artist George Catlin described their offspring as “the finest looking people I have ever seen.” When the U.S. government forced 14,000 Cherokees into a mid-winter "Trail of Tears" march from Georgia to Oklahoma the Cherokees had 1,600 African members.

During the Gold Rush upwards of two thousand African Americans flocked to California and one thousand called themselves prospectors. Some were free, and some of the enslaved were sent or taken by their gold-seeking masters. A few Black men gathered enough gold nuggets and dust to purchase their freedom. In cities some African Americans became chefs, entrepreneurs and land investors, and California soon boasted the wealthiest African American community in the country.

California's Black intellectuals built a two-story "Athenaeum"—an educational center complete with 800 books and a Black museum—and developed a civil rights agenda. In 1855 the new capitol at Sacramento hosted the first of three annual Black state conventions to demand the right to testify in court, to vote and to have their children educated in public schools. The Black convention of 1856 created a newspaper, Mirror of the Times to carry news of their successes and protest campaigns to the state's thirty counties.

California became an early battleground over human rights. In 1846 Mary, a Missouri slave, sued for liberty in a Mexican court in San Jose and won. During Gold Rush days other enslaved people, often assisted by white attorneys, took their masters to court or tried to flee to Canada. Slave Biddy Mason reached California the hard way: she walked all the way from Mississippi in charge of her owner's livestock. Aided by a white Los Angeles sheriff, she served her master with a writ of habeas corpus and after two days in court was granted liberty for herself and her three daughters. A successful midwife, she invested wisely in Los Angeles real estate, and became a noted philanthropist.

Of all the western territories only Utah made slavery legal. In 1848 the 1700 Mormons who settled in the Salt Lake Valley clung to a belief the Scriptures condemned Blacks to servitude. But Mormons and their four dozen enslaved African Americans began by sharing scarce food, crowded shelters and the cruelties of nature. Two years later Black Mormons were able to hold assemblies for social and political purposes in their own Salt Lake City building. Though the Mormons promulgated a "slave code" in 1852 its aim was to discipline masters by requiring them to provide the enslaved decent clothing, food, and opportunities. It permitted a slave sale only with consent. In 1862 Congress ended slavery in Utah and other western territories.

By then more than a few slaves had freed themselves and headed west. Clara Brown arrived by covered wagon in Denver in 1859 when it was still called Cherry Creek, began a laundry, started the first Sunday school, and used her home to organize the Saint James Methodist Church. After the Civil War Brown used money she had saved to search for her relatives lost during slavery. Before she found one daughter, she had brought dozens of former slaves to Colorado and helped them gain an education and find jobs. In 1885 her funeral was attended by the Governor of Colorado, the Mayor of Denver and conducted by the Colorado Pioneers Association.

War and emancipation spurred an African American migration to the West. By 1865 Kansas had a Black population of 12,527, and Leavenworth had two Black churches and 2,400 Black residents. Organized drives for the “sacred right to vote” were mounted in Kansas, Colorado and Nevada. However, that year Colorado voters rejected an equal suffrage by ten to one, and the suffrage issue found western Democratic and Republican politicians largely opposed. Congress' Territorial Suffrage Act of 1867 and the post-war constitutional amendments finally brought the Black suffrage to the West. By 1868 when 120 black Denver voters provided the margin of victory for the Republican congressional candidate, the party moved toward firmer support for equality.

Long before they had become free African Americans in the southwest were roping and branding cattle. After the Civil War they were among 35,000 cowboys who drove Texas cattle up the Chisholm Trail to rail depots in Kansas. In 1925 George Saunders, president of the Old Time Drivers Association, recalled "about one third of the trail crews were Negroes and Mexicans."

Most cowpunchers were ordinary men such as Nat Love, a former Tennessee slave later known as Deadwood Dick, who honed his skills on the long drives and worked for $30 a month and grub. Few were as lucky as former slave D.W. Wallace of Texas who rose from a penniless teen-age cowhand to wealthy ranch owner.

Most cowhands followed the law but some rode in to break it. In 1877 the Texas wanted list with 5,000 names included every race. The first man shot in Dodge City was a Black cowhand named Tex, an innocent bystander to a gun duel between two whites. The first man thrown into Abeline's new stone prison was not innocent and he was black, but his black and white trail crew shot up the town and rescued him. Black desperadoes such as Cherokee Bill and the Rufus Buck gang of the Oklahoma Territory were cut in the mold of Billy the Kid and the Dalton gang: they killed without regard to race, color or creed, and paid with their lives.

Some Black men carried a lawman's badge. Dozens of Black deputies served under "Hanging Judge" Isaac Parker. One, Bass Reeves, became a legend in his time. In 32 years he shot 14 men, but largely relied on his disguises, detective skills and knowledge of Indian languages and customs to outwit and arrest dozens of criminals. In 1874 Willie Kennard convinced a skeptical mayor of Yankee Hill, Colorado to hire him as marshall be facing down Casewit, a deranged killer and rapist, shooting the two guns from his hands and marching him to jail.

Law and order rode into the western territories with the U.S. Cavalry, which included the Black Ninth and Tenth Regiments, a fifth of the U.S. Cavalry soldiers in the West, and the 24th and 25th U.S. Infantry Regiments. Native Americans called them "Buffalo Soldiers" after an animal they relied on for food, clothing and shelter. The Buffalo Soldiers patrolled from the Rio Grande to the Canadian border, from the Mississippi to the Rockies, and won the respect of every military friend and foe they encountered. For acts beyond the call of duty more than a dozen Black troopers earned the Congressional Medal of Honor. However, in Texas they faced harassment and assault from the townspeople they defended.

Rarely did African American women head west alone, but in1868 Elvira Conley arrived in Sheridan, Kansas, a raucous railroad town ruled by vigilantes. She began a laundry and wisely made friends with two of her best customers, Wild Bill Hickok and Buffalo Bill. In Sheridan she also met the wealthy Sellar-Bullard merchant family and spent more than half a century serving as a governess to generations of their children.

The first major Black migration from the southern states began in 1879 when an estimated 8,000 African American men, women and children who agreed “It is better to starve to death in Kansas than be shot and killed in the South” headed west. Founded in 1877, Nicodemus, Kansas served as a beacon, especially after Mrs. Francis Fletcher began a one-room school for 15 Black boys and girls with donated books and a curriculum of literature, hygiene, moral values and mathematics. Mobilized largely by women, often widows of men slain by white marauders in the deep South, they saw Kansas as a promised land of safety, education, farms and decent work.

Like the European immigrants who poured into the United States at this time, Black pioneers largely rejected rural life—which they associated with slavery—for town jobs. Black women pioneers were largely in their 20s to 40s, older and more likely to be married than white women, and had a lower child-bearing rate than either white women or Black women in the East. They were five times as likely to have jobs (usually as domestic servants) as white women and twice as likely to be employed as Indian women.

Celebrating Black History Month 2006
The Black West
In 1889 another great land rush to Oklahoma attracted ten thousand of people of color. Most came from the Deep South and fled mounting violence hoping to see their women and children protected, gain an education and other opportunities. Leaving home in kinship and friendship caravans of a hundred or more people, this travel arrangement provided women a protective, comforting blanket. Since these large caravans included many skilled artisans, the early days of settlement was smoother for Black towns than for white towns. Residents did not have to solicit or wait for missing artisans, as did white communities. The simultaneous arrival of so many families and friends also insured cooperation, minimized conflict and spurred town growth and spirit.

The political career of Edwin P. McCabe charts the ebb and flow of power brought by the Black migrations. In the 1880s, at the height of the Black migration to Kansas, Republicans twice nominated and elected McCabe state auditor, only to denied him a third term. In 1890 he arrived in Oklahoma, helped found Langston City the next year, and championed Oklahoma as a Black refuge from racist violence. He planned to settle a black majority in each congressional district and set his eyes on Oklahoma's territorial governorship. Within eight years Langston City boasted a public school, later a college, and within a decade had virtually eliminated illiteracy among its 15 to 45 year old men (5%) and women (6%).

Boley, Oklahoma, formed in 1904 on land owned by Abigail Barnett, a Black Indian, in two years had a school with two teachers, and later a high school that sent half of its graduates to college. In 1908 Booker T. Washington called Boley "striking evidence" of "land-seekers and home-builders . . . prepared to build up the country." By World War I a thousand Black people lived in Boley, and two thousand ran nearby farms.

Between 1890 and 1910 32 all-Black towns sprouted in Oklahoma. Men ran the governments but women organized community events, built schools, churches and self-help societies and planted middle class values. Then, in 1907 Oklahoma entered the Union as another white supremacy state, the first to segregate telephone booths. Blacks towns still elected local officials but not national or state officers, and Oklahoma fell under the bigoted hand of the state's justice system. Segregation laws and declining agricultural prices spelled ruin, and most Black towns became ghost towns. McCabe's political goal sputtered to earth and he left for Chicago where in 1920 he died in poverty. But his dream lived on in Black migrants' resounding victories over illiteracy.

Women remained a major staple of Black community strength. They put up the walls and nailed down the floors of frontier schools, churches, and self-help societies. In 1864 women in Virginia City, Nevada began the First Baptist Church with a new bound Bible and a dozen hymnbooks. These pioneers went on to demand public education for their children, to begin literary societies, and in 1874 held a Calico Ball for the 374 Blacks living largely in western Nevada.

In Montana, in 1888 Black women started a St. James Church and the next year a Methodist Episcopal Church. By 1924 31 delegates assembled in Bozeman as representatives of Montana's Federation of Black Women's Clubs. In Denver, Colorado in 1906 the Colored Women's Republican Club proudly reported a larger percentage of Black women voted in the city election than white women. By 1910, and largely due to the efforts of women, illiteracy among African Americans in California, Oregon and the Mountain States had been reduced to less than 10%. Even in western prisons 87% of Black women inmates could read and write.

In many locales Black women were so rare that Black bachelors would meet incoming stagecoaches and trains seeking a marriage partner. Western women were far more likely to marry than their sisters in the east. In Arizona mining towns it was married Black women who, distressed by the single men who disturbed the peace at night and on weekends, formed the “Busy Bee Club.” Their strategy was to contact Black churches and newspapers in the east and arrange for the transportation of mail order brides-to-be for unmarried miners. Young women, promising to wed the men who paid their fare, boarded trains for Arizona. Young brides survived tense wedding days to meet the challenges of frontier family life.

Other Black towns sprouted. California gave birth to Albia, Allensworth, Bowles, Victorville, and Texas produced Andy, Booker, Board House, Cologne, Independence Heights, Kendleton, Oldham, Mill City, Roberts, Shankleville and Union City. The last high plains Black settlement was Dearfield, Colorado, founded in 1910 by Oliver and Minerva Jackson and settled by 700 poor, older women and men with little capital and scant farming experience. During World War I Dearfield prospered only to be struck by water shortage and searing winds and finally toppled by the post-war agricultural depression.

Black farming communities had marched into battle without the necessary weapons. Black pioneers, having less capital than whites, were unable to purchase the large acreage required for survival. Unable to get easy credit, they became less able to weather economic and natural disasters. And like rural whites, in the age of the automobile and movies, the jobs and bright lights of cities constantly lured their young.

The West produced unusual and distinguished women and men of color. In 1866 Cathy Williams dressed as "William Cathy" and served for two years as a soldier in the Buffalo Soldiers. Barney Ford built a palatial Inter-Ocean Hotel in Denver and then another in Cheyenne, Wyoming. An African American cowpuncher named Williams taught a New York City tenderfoot named Theodore Roosevelt how to break in a horse, and another Black cowboy named Clay taught movie star Will Rogers his first rope tricks. Mifflin Gibbs rose from a California bootblack to start the state's first Black newspaper, graduated college and became a judge in Little Rock, Arkansas.

In Texas, Sutton Griggs at 26 became a Baptist minister and a published novelist, and went on to write seven books of fiction and essays. Born a slave in Texas, Lucy Gonzales Parsons became the first prominent socialist revolutionary of color, an advocate for the wretched of the earth and a voice for the working class in the United States. As editors of the popular Seattle Republican, Susan and Horace Cayton became wealthy and leading citizens of the new state of Washington. Six foot, 200 pound Mary Fields ran a restaurant and laundry in Cascade, Montana, and in her sixties as "Stagecoach Mary" delivered the U.S. Mail and drove a stagecoach. In 1898 widow May Mason of Seattle rushed off to the Yukon, Alaska gold rush and returned with $5,000 in gold and a $6,000 land claim. Oscar Micheaux wrote seven novels, including two fictionalized autobiographies of his life in South Dakota, and as a pioneer movie producer wrote 45 films that cast his people as cowboys, detectives and doctors.

African American pioneers were a hearty breed and they had to be, for they faced more than their white counterparts. To live at peace on the frontier, they had to survive the raging storms of nature and man, and overcome the bony hand of bigotry.

With undaunted spirit, raw courage and a dogged persistence, Black pioneers added a new dimension to western life. They more than earned a right to ride off into the sunset and across the pages of history books.