Sweet Freedom's Plains: African Americans on the Overland Trails, 1841–1869 (Volume 12) (Race and Culture in the American West Series)

Sweet Freedom's Plains: African Americans on the Overland Trails, 1841–1869 (Volume 12) (Race and Culture in the American West Series)

The westward migration of nearly half a million Americans in the mid-nineteenth century looms large in U.S. history. Classic images of rugged Euro-Americans traversing the plains in their prairie schooners still stir the popular imagination. But this traditional narrative, no matter how alluring, falls short of the actual—and far more complex—reality of the overland trails. Among the diverse peoples who converged on the western frontier were African American pioneers—men, women, and children. Whether enslaved or free, they too were involved in this transformative movement. Sweet Freedom’s Plains is a powerful retelling of the migration story from their perspective. Tracing the journeys of black overlanders who traveled the Mormon, California, Oregon, and other trails, Shirley Ann Wilson Moore describes in vivid detail what they left behind, what they encountered along the way, and what they expected to find in their new, western homes. She argues that African Americans understood advancement and prosperity in ways unique to their situation as an enslaved and racially persecuted people, even as they shared many of the same hopes and dreams held by their white contemporaries. For African Americans, the journey westward marked the beginning of liberation and transformation. At the same time, black emigrants’ aspirations often came into sharp conflict with real-world conditions in the West. Although many scholars have focused on African Americans who settled in the urban West, their early trailblazing voyages into the Oregon Country, Utah Territory, New Mexico Territory, and California deserve greater attention. Having combed censuses, maps, government documents, and white overlanders’ diaries, along with the few accounts written by black overlanders or passed down orally to their living descendants, Moore gives voice to the countless, mostly anonymous black men and women who trekked the plains and mountains. Sweet Freedom’s Plains places African American overlanders where they belong—at the center of the western migration narrative. Their experiences and perspectives enhance our understanding of this formative period in American history. Shirley Ann Wilson Moore is Professor Emerita at California State University Sacramento, where she specialized in U.S. and African American history. She received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1989. Moore is the author of To Place Our Deeds: The African American Community in Richmond, California, 1910–1963 and coeditor, with Quintard Taylor, of African American Women Confront the West, 1600–2000 . Sweet Freedom's Plains African Americans on the Overland Trails, 1841–1869 By Shirley Ann Wilson Moore UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS Copyright © 2016 Shirley Ann Wilson Moore All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8061-5562-3 Contents List of Illustrations, Acknowledgments, Introduction, 1. The Early Black Presence in the West, 2. On the Eve of Overland Migration: Antebellum Slavery and Freedom, 3. The Jumping-Off Places, 4. The Providential Corridor, 5. Community and Work on the Trails, 6. Life, Death, and Acts of Kindness, 7. Sweet Freedom's Plains, 8. Place of Promise, Epilogue, Notes, Bibliography, Index, CHAPTER 1 The Early Black Presence in the West When Esteban got away from [Marcos de Niza] ... he craved to gain honor and fame in every thing and to be credited with the boldness and daring of discovering, all by himself, those terraced pueblos, so famed throughout the land. Pedro de Castañeda, 1640 The forts that now afford protection to the traveler were built by ourselves at the constant peril of our lives, amid Indian tribes nearly double their present numbers. Without wives and children to comfort us on our lonely way; without well-furnished wagons to resort to when hungry; no roads before us but trails temporarily made. James P. Beckwourth, 1856 AFRICAN AMERICANS WHO SET OUT on the overland trails in the mid-nineteenth century were not the first African-descended people to journey across the continent in search of freedom, riches, land, and adventure. People of African ancestry had been a presence on the American continent since the early days of Spanish and other European exploration; their presence in what is now known as the American West predates the arrival of Africans in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. The nineteenth-century overland migrations that brought countless African American emigrants westward mark a critical point in the migrational arc of African-descended people into the western region — an arc that would continue well into the twentieth century. The roots of the movement are found in the sixteenth century, as explorers and settlers of African ancestry pushed northward into "the West" to establish new outposts for the empire of New Spain, a realm that included today's southeastern United States, stretching from west of the Mississippi River to what is now Mexico and Central Ame