Celebrating Black History Month 2006
The Black West

"If the American frontier did not exist, it would have to have been invented." —Voltaire

"The frontier is the most American part of America." —Lord Bryce

"The Westerner has been the type and master of our American life." —Woodrow Wilson

In the nineteenth century scholars transformed our frontier saga from a grim duel with nature that unleashed the worst and best in people into a national mythology to honor Europeans for building a nation in the wilderness. This revised tale was not subject to Indian claims. It forever omitted people of African descent, and denied them a place in dime novels, school texts and tales of pioneer life. When 20th Hollywood's central casting selected actors to race across silver screens, African Americans were invisible.

This has begun to change. Like the dark, mysterious figures in "horse operas" that suddenly ride into town only to be recognized as missing earlier settlers, African American men and women of the West have come home. Scholarly diligence has cleared a path for these long neglected pioneers to enter the public consciousness.

From the dawn of the earliest foreign landings Africans were a crucial force in the New World. Professor van Van Sertima has documented their presence before Columbus thought of sailing westward to reach the riches of Asia. Their presence after Columbus has been affirmed in explorers' diaries, viceroys' letters, church records, government reports, fur company ledgers, recollections of Indians and whites, newspaper accounts, and census reports. Their faces have been captured in sketches by artists Charles Russell and Frederick Remington, and by early professional and amateur cameramen, military and civilian. Some sat for portraits in pencil or oil and others kept diaries, notes or wrote letters. These tell of Black families that forded rivers, scaled mountains, and slogged through marshes and deserts, and on the way enriched the culture and economy of America's frontier. The frontier role of African Americans—often buried, strayed or lost from view—is now clear.

Pietro Alonzo il Negro, traveling with Columbus in 1492 was pilot of the Nini. In 1513 African laborers marched with Vasco Balboa when he stumbled on a village of African people near Panama whose existence has never been fully explained. Other Africans marched into the wilderness alongside of, or a little ahead of Father Serra, Chief Pontiac, Ponce de Leon and Davy Crockett. Slaves, fugitive slaves, or free, they entered the continent as explorers, fur trappers, adventurers, school teachers, homesteaders, deputy sheriffs, cowboys, soldiers, outlaws, miners, journalists and entrepreneurs.

Europeans first built their American labor system on Native American enslavement, and soon began to feed in captured Africans. Two peoples of color became husbands, wives, sisters and brothers, and with Native Americans showing the way, together they fled their chains. In 1503 when Governor Ovando of Hispaniola reported his African slaves fled to the rainforest, his complaint that they “never could be captured” probably meant they had found a red hand of friendship. Africans were welcomed by an Indian adoption system that drew no color lines. They also arrived with unique agricultural skills and a familiarity with European weapons and diplomacy.

In a grim record filled with ironies, the subjugation of the New World was led by Spain, since 711 when Moors invaded the Iberian Peninsula, a nation of mixed races. The opening of Africa by European merchants in 1442 and Spain's expulsion of the Moors in 1492 enabled the invaders to make the New World a massive experiment in colonization and enslavement.

Africans, slave and free, traveled as soldiers or laborers with each European expedition to the Americas. They landed in Florida with Ponce de Leon and in 1519 Africans dragged the cannons Hernando Cortez used to vanquish the Aztec empire. Others marched under the Pizarro brothers in their conquest of Peru and still others aided Francisco de Montejo to subdue Honduras. In 1539 Estevanico, an African Moor who easily picked up Indian languages, served as the scout for an exploration led by Farther Marcos de Nizza.  Estevanico, accompanied by 300 Indians, became the first non-Indian to enter Arizona and New Mexico.

Though colonial officials warned about the danger of Africans  associating with Native Americans, European armies of occupation invariably included men of African descent. Many took the opportunity to flee to Indian villages beyond the European bastions that dotted the coastlines. A European report from Mexico in 1537 noted: "The Indians and the Negroes daily wait, hoping to put into practice their freedom from the domination and servitude in which Spaniards keep them." That year Black miners in Amatepeque, Mexico revolted, elected a ruler, and assisted by Native Mexicans, militarily challenged Spanish hegemony.

In 1579 four Africans accompanied Sir Francis Drake when he landed in San Francisco. In 1588 Africans helped Juan de Onate colonize New Mexico and remained to take part in its civil wars two generations later. They joined and helped lead the Pueblo Indian uprising of 1680 that overthrew Spanish rule. Beginning in 1769 Africans helped Father Junipero Serra's Jesuit missionaries build missions in California. Those who remained appear in church birth, marriage and death records, and others melted into Native villages.

From the North Carolina's Great Dismal Swamp to Brazilian rainforests two peoples of color fled together and formed "maroon societies." Though most maroon communities were committed to trade and/or agriculture, Europeans considered them bandits and one scholar called them "the gangrene of colonial society." Europeans conducted unrelenting legal and military assaults on their right to survive as alternative societies. By the American Revolution hundreds of armed Africans and Seminoles had settled along Florida's Apalachicola River. The Africans taught arriving Seminoles, a breakaway segment of the Creek nation, methods of rice cultivation they had learned in Senegambia and Sierra Leone. On this basis these red and black people formed an agricultural and military alliance that held the United States Army, Navy and Marines at bay for forty-two years.

In 1781 Los Angeles was founded by 46 people (11 different families) and 26 were of African descent. One, Manuel Camero, served on the city council from 1781 to 1816. Another, Francisco Reyes, owned the San Fernando Valley and until he sold it and became the city's first mayor. Maria Rita Valdez, daughter of a Black founder, owned Beverly Hills, and still others owned large tracts of land and large herds of cattle. In 1790 a Spanish census of California uncovered a sizable African presence: San Francisco, 18%, San Jose, 24%, Santa Barbara 20%, Monterey, 18%.

Texas also had a richly diverse population. San Antonio was founded in 1718 by 72 people, many of African descent, and in 1777 151 Africans were listed among its 2,060 residents. In 1789 of Laredo's 708 residents 119 were of African parentage. However, after 1795 when Spain's King Charles III declared Africans inferior to Spaniards, and the Crown sold certificates allowing residents to claim greater Spanish blood, the census reported a sharp drop in the number of Black people.

In the 1820s enslaved men and women, free people of color and runaways, some responding to Stephen Austin's invitation, entered east Texas from the United States. Fugitive slaves and others sought the liberty promised by anti-slavery Mexican officials. In 1829 Vicente Guerrero, a revolutionary hero born of African and Indian parents, became president of Mexico, wrote its new constitution and liberated its slaves.

By the 1830s free African Americans in Texas had made their mark. In the southeast the four Ashworth brothers owned almost two thousand acres of land and 2,500 cattle, and were able to avoid military service by hiring substitutes. In 1831 Greenbury Logan traveled to Texas with Stephen Austin where he volunteered for and was severely wounded in the war that freed Texas from Mexico. The slaveholders who came to rule the Lone Star Republic showed no respect for the rights of this wounded Black veteran. During the Mexican War Texas' slaves fled plantations to the Colorado, the Nueces and the Red Rivers, or to Commanches or Santa Ana's armies. Pio Pico, born to a prominent family of mixed African descent, was the last Mexican governor of California. He served from 1845 to 1846 when he surrendered to the victorious U.S. army.

In San Francisco, William Leidesdorff of Danish-African de-scent, a wealthy and fervent U.S. partisan, in 1845 was appointed a U.S. vice-consul by President Polk. He secretly plotted to overthrow Mexican rule and not only welcomed U.S. Captain John Montgomery and his army, but spent a night translating the proclamation on the transfer of power that Montgomery read to the assembled citizens at the plaza the next day.

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