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The Black West
A Documentary and Pictorial History of the African American Role in the Westward Expansion of the United States
William Loren Katz
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eBook - ePub
The Black West
A Documentary and Pictorial History of the African American Role in the Westward Expansion of the United States
William Loren Katz
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About This Book
This entirely new edition of a famous classic has glorious new photographsâmany never before seenâas well as revised and expanded text that deepens our understanding of the vital role played by African American men and women on America's early frontiers. This revised volume includes an exciting new chapter on the Civil War and the experiences of African Americans on the western frontier. Among its fascinating accounts are those explaining how thousands of enslaved people in Arkansas, Missouri and Texas successfully escaped into the neighboring Indian Territory in Oklahoma. These runaways inspired the idea eventually adopted as the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves within the states that were in rebellion. Inspired by a conversation that William Loren Katz had with Langston Hughes, The Black West presents long-neglected stories of daring pioneers like Nat Love, a.k.a. Deadwood Dick; Mary Fields, a.k.a. Stagecoach Mary; Cranford Goldsby, a.k.a. Cherokee Billâand a host of other intrepid men and women who marched into the wilderness alongside Chief Osceola, Billy the Kid, and Geronimo.
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1
Indians and Africans in the Age of Exploration
The Africans who sailed with Columbus, Balboa, and the other major European expeditions in the âage of explorationâ helped change the Americas and the world. In 1513 thirty Africans with Balboa hacked their way through the lush vegetation of Panama and reached the Pacific. His men paused to build the first large European ships on the Pacific coast. Africans were with Ponce de LeĂłn when he reached Florida, and when Cortez conquered Mexico, three hundred Africans dragged his huge cannons in battle. One stayed on to plant and harvest the first wheat crop in the New World.
Africans marched into Peru with Pizarro, where they carried his murdered body to the cathedral. They were with Amalgro and Valdivia in Chile, Alvarado in Educador, and Cabrillo when he reached California. The Europeans destroyed a world, but many Africans peeled away from the devastation to seek a new life. Many found it among Native Americans in Mexico, the Southwest, and elsewhere in the Americas.
The first Africans to enter the chronicles of New World, whom historian Ira Berlin has called âAtlantic Creoles,â were men possessed of extraordinary language skills and familiar with life in Africa, Europe, and the Americas. âFluent in [the Americasâ] new languages, and intimate with its trade and cultures, they were cosmopolitan in the fullest sense,â Berlin wrote of these intercontinental pioneers. Historian Peter Bakker elaborates on their contributions:
Especially in the earliest contact period, Africans were highly valued by Europeans as interpreters with the Native Americans. These men of African origins were not slaves but free black men in the employ of various European trading and exploratory ventures.
The use of Africans as interpreters in trading and exploratory ventures was initiated by the Portuguese in the fifteenth century. Prince Henry the Navigator ordered in 1435 that interpreters be used on all such voyages. Portuguese ships thereafter systematically brought Africans to Lisbon where they would be taught Portuguese so that they could be used to interpret on subsequent voyages to Africa.
The Portuguese strategy was imitated by other Europeans.
In 1540, when Coronado reached âThe Cities of Gold,â Africans played a vital role in his expedition. However, artist Harold A. Wolfenlager Jr.âs 1969 painting marginalizes them.
Hired initially as interpreters, negotiators, and ambassadors, many of these Africans settled in the Americas and struck out on their own. In Latin America the Catholic Church celebrated their souls, consecrated their marriages, baptized their children, and buried their remains in hallowed ground. In the seventeeth century, from Angola to Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro, African settlers formed religious brotherhoods and self-help societies, and by 1650 Havana, Mexico City, and San Salvador had âAtlantic Creoleâ communities.
Cherokee mother and daughter, around 1931
In North America âboth whites and Indians relied heavily on Negro interpretersâ writes historian J. Leitch Wright, Jr., and they were considered âamong the most versatile in the world.â Africans proved highly effective in building peaceful relations with Native Americans. In the Carolinas in the 1710s, Timboe, an African, was âa highly valued interpreterâ whose role, historian Peter Woods writes, âis emblematic of the intriguing intermediary position occupied by all Negro slaves during these years.â
European officials began to call some Africans impudent and arrogant. They were usually referring to those who successfully advanced their own interests, launched merchant businesses, or became independent career diplomats. Matthieu da Costa, an African, may have visited the site of New York as a translator for the French or Dutch before Henry Hudsonâs Half Moon reached it in 1609. Dutch and French officials battled each other in court for the exclusive right to da Costaâs services. In New Amsterdam two years before the Dutch built their first fort, Jan Rodriguez, an African, established a trading post among the Algonquins.
Enslaved Africans were sold from North America to Brazil in 1845.
Brady photograph showing the marriage of two peoples
Africans and Indians: Slaves and Allies
In their quest for riches, the conquistadores cast the long shadow of slavery on the Americas. On October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus recorded in his diary: âI took some of the natives by force.â Six years later explorer John Cabot seized three Native Americans. The European conquest led to a drive to enslave laborers.
In 1520 Lucas VĂĄsquez de AyllĂłn dispatched two emissaries to South Carolinaâs Atlantic coast to build friendship among Native people and locate a site for his colony. Instead, the two seized seventy Native Americans: this made the first European act on what would become U.S. soil the enslavement of free people.
In April 1526, AyllĂłn sailed to the South Carolina coast to build his dream settlement, San Miguel de Gualdape. He arrived with five hundred Spaniards and one hundred African laborers. But mismanagement, disease, and Indian hostility dogged his colony for six months and took AyllĂłnâs life. Then Indian resistance and slave defiance tore it apart, and the surviving Europeans retreated to Santo Domingo. The remaining Africans joined with neighboring Native Americans, and together they created the first permanent U.S. settlement to include people from overseas. Their peaceful colony, marked by friendship and cooperation between foreigners and newcomers, introduced an American legacy not born of conquest. The conquistadores soon overran San Miguel de Gualdape, but it came to have many models in the Americas.
This antique print, entitled America, used dancing to show peaceful relations between Africans and Native Americans.
Native Americans were the first people enslaved by Europeans in the New World, but they died by the millions of foreign diseases, overwork, and cruelty. European merchants turned next to Africa and seized its strongest men, women, and children to perform the hard work of the new lands.
This meant that Indian and African people first met in the slave huts, mines, and plantations of the Americas. In 1502 Nicolas de Ovando, the new governor of Hispaniola, Spainâs headquarters in the Caribbean, arrived in a flotilla that carried the first enslaved Africans. Within a year Ovando reported to King Ferdinand his Africans had escaped, found a new life among the Native Americans, and ânever could be captured.â He was describing an American tradition earlier than the first Thanksgiving.
In the following decades enslaved Africans and Indians escaped bondage together and began to unite against the common foe. Anthropologist Richard Price studied the sacred legends of the Saramaka people of Dutch Guiana, now Suriname, which date back to 1685. In one, Lanu, an African slave who would become a leader of the Saramakas, escaped, and Wamba, the Indiansâ forest spirit, entered his mind to lead him to a Native village. âThe Indians escaped first and then, since they knew the forest, they came back and liberated the Africans,â concluded Price.
Once free of the European conquerors, Africans and Native Americans found they had more in common with each other than with a foe wielding muskets and whips. For both peoples the spiritual and environmental merged. Religion was not confined to a single day of prayer but was a matter of daily reflection and action. Africans and Indians believed that community needs, not private gain, should determine judicial, economic, and life decisions. Both accepted an economy based on cooperation, and were baffled by the conquerorâs passion to accumulate wealth.
A successful slave rebellion in Haiti in the 1790s convinced Napoleon that France could not hold its American empire. In 1803 he sold the Louisiana Territory to the United States for four cents an acre.
During the conquest the two peoples brought each other important gifts. The Middle Passage and enslavement gave Africans a multidimensional understanding of European goals, diplomacy, and weaponry. To Native Americans they brought their knowledge of the foeâs plans, weaknesses, and often valuable arms and ammunition. Native American societies offered Africans a red hand of friendship, a refuge, a new life â and a base for insurgency.
In the early decades of the sixteenth century, slave revolts in Colombia, Cuba, Panama, and Puerto Rico often found Africans and Native Americans acting in unison. In 1537 Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza of Hispaniola told of a major rebellion that threatened Mexico City, saying the Africans âhad chosen a king, and⌠the Indians were with them.â By 1570 Spanish colonial officials admitted that one in ten slaves were living free. Viceroy Martin Enriquez later warned, âthe time is coming when these [African] people will have become masters of the Indians, inasmuch as they were born among them and their maidens and are men who dare to die as well as any Spaniard.â
In the Southwest, Africans joined the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 as leaders and soldiers, helping to drive out Spainâs armies and missionaries and freeing the region for a dozen years. Decades before fifty-five white men met in Philadelphia in 1776 and wrote the Declaration of Independence, people of color in the continent had revolted against foreign rule, injustice, and slavery. They became the first freedom fighters of the Americas.
A runaway is captured in the French colonies.
âDivision of the races is an indispensable element,â warned a Spanish official. European governors constantly sought to destroy the alliances in the woods with tactics of divide and rule. In 1523 Hernando Cortez enforced a royal order in Mexico that banned Africans from Indian villages. In 1723 Jean-Baptiste LeMoyne de Bienville, founding governor of Louisiana, urged that putting âthese barbarians into play against each other is the sole and only way to establish any security in the colony.â In 1776 U.S. Colonel Stephen Bull, saying his policy was to âestablish a hatredâ between the two races, dispatched Indians to hunt Black runaways in the Carolinas.
Staggering rewards were offered to Africans to fight Indians and Indians to fight Africans. In the Carolinas Native Americans were bribed with three blankets and a musket, and in Virginia it was thirty-five deerskins. Govern...