Negroes and the Gun (25 page)

When the Five Nations were driven west under the 1830 Indian Removal Act, the four slave-owning tribes (Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, and Creek) took their Negro slaves with them. Wealthier members owned enough Negroes to constitute up to 15 percent of the tribal populations. Settling in newly designated Indian Territory (much of modern-day Oklahoma), they continued to hold and acquire slaves with the encouragement of Indian agents in the employ of the United States government.
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Negroes enslaved by Indians were generally better treated than the slaves of whites, a trend that caused one Indian agent to recommend bringing in white men to show how American slavery was supposed to be done. Still, the impulse to resist slavery generated breaks for freedom, and slaves sometimes deployed firearms in the attempt.

In November 1842, a group of Negroes in Weber Falls, Indian Territory, seized guns, horses, and supplies and fled to Mexico. Some suspected that Seminoles had incited the revolt. The fugitives were pursued by their Cherokee masters and fought them off in a two-day gun battle. Finally, Cherokee reinforcements subdued the runaways and returned them to punishments of whipping and hanging.
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In other parts of Indian Territory, the population of runaway slaves was substantial enough to produce robust fugitive communities. One group of about two hundred built a
fort on the Washita River and was blamed for raids and killings in the area for more than a decade.

Indian Territory would be surrounded by the Confederacy, and the Five Civilized Tribes aligned with the South during the Civil War. Tribal slaves freed after the Civil War accounted for one strand of the black population in the west, although, in a curious detail, slavery in Indian Territory was not dissolved by the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 but by treaty in 1866.

Within the Indian nations, blacks fought for equal rights in a fashion that resembled the broader national struggle. But black Indians also acknowledged an advantage to living under the jurisdiction of the Indian Nations versus the United States. Black Indian leader O. S. Fox reminded his friends that “the opportunities for our people in that country far surpassed any of the kind possessed by our people in the U.S.”

When the federal government divided tribal lands among individuals in the 1880s, freedmen of Indian masters were treated like members of the tribe and received homesteads of eighty-eight acres
.
While in the rest of United States, the final decades of the nineteenth century was one of the lowest points of the black American experience, in 1884, the Indian Nations were arguing the question of full equality for black members.
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The appetite for western expansion eventually consumed large parts of Indian Territory. In 1889, the federal government forced Indian tribes to surrender their land in exchange for cash and sparked the rush of homesteaders into Oklahoma Territory. Among those who lined up to claim their portion, approximately ten thousand were Negroes. The black Indians already in the territory dubbed these newcomers “State Negroes.”

For blacks from the east, the promise of free land was an opportunity to build an independent black society. One of the most ambitious promoters of this movement was Edwin P. McCabe. McCabe had the grand vision of transforming the Oklahoma Territory into a black state where he would serve as governor. Toward that dream, McCabe founded the town of Langston, which seeded twenty-seven other black towns in the territory.

McCabe's ambitions were ill received by whites. An 1890 article from the
Kansas City News
reports that whites “almost foam at the mouth whenever McCabe's name is suggested for Governor [and] also at the idea of Negroes getting control.” A concurrent
New York Times
report speculated that McCabe might soon be assassinated.

McCabe and his community appreciated the hazards. The threat was palpable in September 1891, as the Sac and Fox Indian reservations were scheduled to open for settlement. McCabe had been coaxing blacks for more than a year to come and
claim their share of the bounty. He also was candid about the challenges.

Blacks had been run out of several other staging towns. But in Langston City, more than two thousand armed Negroes assembled in preparation for the land rush. After sporadic bouts of gunfire, McCabe himself was accosted and fired on by three white men. He was rescued by a group of friends wielding Winchester rifles. It was exactly the kind of scenario that prompted Ida B. Wells to advocate a Winchester in every Negro home. And within seven months of Negroes wielding Winchesters in defense of Edwin McCabe, Wells would walk among them in Oklahoma.
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Fig. 4.4. Portrait of Edwin McCabe.

After the Tom Moss lynching, the
Langston City Herald
solicited blacks in Memphis, urging that it “would be a good place for the colored people to leave.” Some claimed that Tom Moss spent his last breath urging Negroes to abandon Memphis and head west. Exiled in New York, Ida B. Wells put a sharp point on the assessment of those in the Memphis emigration movement. “Many of our exchanges have been calling Memphis hell, without stopping to think they were doing the real hell an injustice. Hell . . . is a place of punishment for the wicked—Memphis is a place of punishment for the good, brave and enterprising.”

Wells was serious about the prospect of western migration, but she was also cautious about endorsing a place she had never seen. In 1882, she undertook a fact-finding mission, traveling as a guest of her cousin's husband, I. F. Norris. Norris was an emigration agent paid to promote black settlement in Oklahoma. He arranged for Wells to see for herself whether Oklahoma was a promising destination for Negroes. Wells arrived in Oklahoma in April and spent three weeks there. She had meetings with the
Langston City Herald
, and it would be surprising if she did not discuss the recent attack on Edwin McCabe and his rescue by black men with Winchesters.
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Wells took the dignitary's tour, traveling from Langston City to the territorial capital of Guthrie, to Oklahoma City, and to the town of King Fisher. Along the way, she was encouraged to see black councilmen, constables, and school
committees. But Wells also detected a clear sentiment of opposition to the “Africanizing” of Oklahoma manifested by multilayered threats.

Simmering hostilities in the town of King Fisher confirmed the wisdom of Wells's views about armed self-defense, and the black men of King Fisher were precisely in accord with Wells. They formed a squad of men armed with Winchester rifles and threatened to sack the town if anyone in their community was harmed. A traveling journalist observed, “the colored men in Oklahoma mean business. . . . They have an exalted idea of their own rights and liberties and they dare to maintain them. . . . I found in nearly every cabin visited a modern Winchester oiled and ready for use.”
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Wells's final assessment of the Oklahoma Territory was skeptical. She might have been encouraged by the fact that a justifiable shooting of a white man by a Negro, like the incident in the black town of Boley, could conclude without a lynching. But she saw insufficient employment opportunities to support “an indiscriminate exodus of our people.” And she probably was right about the inability of the territory to absorb a mass of blacks looking for jobs and neighborhoods like they would leave in Memphis. Still,
folk came
.
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The black towns in Indian Territory are only one aspect of the rich black presence in the west. Even among the solitary mountain men and trappers who operated on the edge of the frontier, Negroes carved their place. Notable among them was Jim Beckwith, son of a white man and a slave woman. Beckwith trapped beaver, survived gunfights, and lived and finally died among the Crow Indians. But for the happenstance of telling his story to a traveling reporter, Beckwith and his exploits would be lost to us. And while the number of these black mountain men cannot be determined for certain, it is clear that Beckwith was not unique. Witness Edward Rose, who appears in a broader treatment of the western mountain men of the 1830s. His reported exploits with the gun satisfy every western stereotype.
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Frontier-era conflicts along the color line become blurred and complicated as red, black, and white men mixed together in various contexts. A typical pathway for blacks into Texas was as slaves to migrating whites. These Negroes sometimes found themselves fighting Indian raiding parties that had attacked their white masters. In other situations, blacks actually joined with Indians in renegade raiding parties like the ones that attacked the Hoover family in 1861 and Texas rancher George Hazlewood in 1868. In some cases, Negroes were actually on both sides of the conflict, as in 1869 when a group of Indian fighters led by a black man attacked a dozen cowboys, killing three of them and wounding five others. They were finally run off by gunfire from a rescue party headed by a Negro cowboy.

In 1845, when Texas entered the union, it had about 100,000 white settlers and 35,000 slaves. By 1861, the slave population had grown to about 182,000. The promise of freedom in Mexico was a particular draw for slaves along the southern border. An 1845 report from Houston illustrates the character of that resistance. According to the
Houston Telegraph
, a group of twenty-five Negroes escaped from Bastrop, “mounted on some of the best horses that could be found, and several of them were well armed. It is supposed that some Mexican . . . enticed them to flee to the Mexican settlements West of the Rio Grande.”
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The draw to Mexico was strong enough that in 1854, the
Austin State Times
reported that more than 200,000 slaves had escaped to Mexico. This estimate is fantastically exaggerated (the 1860 census reported 182,556 slaves in Texas). But it does show that slave escapes into Mexico were a pressing concern. A more realistic estimate of Texas fugitives appears in the complaint of southwest Texas slave owners that more than four thousand fugitive Negroes were living across the border.
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The worry about Mexico as a growing haven for fugitives boiled over in 1855. A border settlement of Indians and fugitive Negroes led by a chief named Wildcat had been a particular lure for Texas slaves. The settlement was such a draw for runaways that south Texas slaveholders raised $20,000 for a punitive expedition against it. In 1855, one hundred thirty Texans led by a captain of the Texas Rangers rode across the border to break up the settlement and retrieve fugitive slaves. They were repelled by a superior force of Negroes, Indians, and Mexicans who were waiting in ambush. Roundly whipped, they fled back across the border carrying their wounded and some baubles from the little town of Piedras Negras that they looted on the way out.
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Presidents James Polk and Zachary Taylor both pressed Mexico to return fugitive slaves to their owners. The precise Mexican reply, that “no foreign government would be allowed to touch a slave who had sought refuge in Mexico,” probably never filtered down to the average Texas slave. But there was plainly an appreciation among Negroes that freedom lay south. This was the draw for a slave girl named Rachel who, along with two others, stole guns and fled across the border. A slave named Bill followed the same script. The “bright mulatto . . . knocked down his overseer and ran off with a double barrel shotgun.”
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Although dwarfed by the population of slaves, free blacks pursued their own opportunities in the prewar west. A rare and striking case is the Ashworth family, which in 1850 owned two thousand acres of land, more than five thousand head of cattle, and at least a dozen slaves. In a swirl of jealousy, ambition, and tribalism, they tumbled to the center of what came to be known as the Orange County War.

Originally from Louisiana, the Ashworths settled around the east Texas town of Madison (now Orange) in the early 1830s. Census records show four brothers
and their families. There is some dispute about whether they fought for the Republic of Texas in its war of independence from Mexico. At least two of them sent substitutes.
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