Celebrating Black History Month 2006
The Black West
(Page 2 of 3)

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.

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