Black Americans and Covered Wagons
ANNETTE TELLS TALES: Two Short Stories Adapted from "Sweet Freedom's Plains", A Book That Changes What We Thought We Knew About the West
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I am delighted to share with you my short post based on two stories from Dr. Shirley Ann Wilson Moore’s fascinating Sweet Freedom’s Plains: African-Americans on the Overland Trails, 1841-1869. UPDATE: I added the first section below (The Past Doesn’t Change. But History Does) 11/20/21.
The Past Doesn’t Change. But History Does.
The first time I visited Scotts Bluff National Historic Monument in Nebraska, in 2018, the little museum in the Visitors’ Center at this landmark on 19th century wagon routes west was closed, preparing for renovation.
So I swung by this summer, and as I noted at the time (scroll down to Bluffed at Scotts Bluff), the new museum now, for the first time, includes a mention of black people on the overland trails.
Before any of my readers get outraged at the smallness of this addition, let’s be clear. This is a tiny museum about the historical significance of Scotts Bluff, which is a detour rather than a destination for most of its visitors.
But that smallness may be an advantage, because most visitors to Scotts Bluff don’t have hours to stand around reading huge panels of text (in fact, most visitors to any museum aren’t inclined to stand around reading huge panels of text, and yes, that is sound advice for museums).
Some visitors will see this and think this is some “woke” “revisionist” addition. But here’s the thing: While the past doesn’t change, history does. It is always revisionist, not in the sense, of, say, Holocaust denial, but because evidence becomes available, and just as how we all think changes over the years, so do historians’ questions.
Many museum visitors won’t think at all about the inclusion of this line of text. Some, I assure you, will read it with the warm glow one gets when ones ethnic group is finally acknowledged as part of the story (How am I so sure? Ask me sometime about being a Scot growing up in England).
And some visitors will think, wow, why didn’t I know that before?
Most people until recently got what they know about the overland trails from TV and movies. The only western that showed Black people with covered wagons, to my knowledge, was Mel Brooks’s brilliant and edgy comedy Blazing Saddles (the writers for which included Richard Pryor and Alan Uger).
So why are National Parks Service museums in the West changing now? They asked an academic historian for help (and it’s a bit shocking how often they don’t). Moreover, they asked the right academic historian: Shirley Ann Wilson Moore. The report she wrote for them became the book Sweet Freedom’s Plains, from which I have adapted these two stories for Non-Boring History.
The Fords Go East to Go West: 1851
Barney and Julia Ford, mid-19th century Midwesterners, were successful people who nonetheless itched to go West. In that, they had a lot in common with Ledyard and Margaret Frink, westward pioneers whose story I have already told.
The Fords, like the Frinks and thousands of others, were lured by the promise of California gold. In 1851, they decided to take the plunge. Unlike the Frinks, who outfitted luxury wagons for the grueling overland route, the Fords opted to go via the even more expensive but quicker sea route.
The Fords lived in Chicago. But they didn’t travel the obvious way. They didn't go south via riverboat down the Mississippi to New Orleans to board a ship.
Instead, they took a train east to New York. From New York, they then sailed south, intending to go the fastest route: By sea as far as the narrowest part of Central America, before crossing by land to the Pacific. This was quicker and likely safer than sailing around the tip of South America, although it was not without its perils.
By the time the Fords reached Nicaragua, Barney had made new plans. Just like Ledyard Frink and others, he had realized that there was big and easy money to be made from goldseekers, and, again like the Frinks, he and Julia decided to open a hotel.
Unlike the Frinks, Barney and Julia didn’t go all the way West to open their business.
Instead, the Fords dropped their plans to go to California, and established the United States Hotel and Restaurant in Greytown, Nicaragua.
Greytown was a booming place, offering plenty of travel services to Gold Rushers: From here, arriving American passengers took boats up the San Juan River, and then, by coach, horse, or mule, were carried overland to the Pacific, where ships awaited to carry them the rest of the way to California.
But there was a lot of tension among Americans, Nicaraguans, and the British government, which held a protectorate in the area, over who was going to profit from all this economic activity.
Finally, the U.S. Navy settled the matter when it bombarded Greytown, destroying many buildings, including, ironically, the Fords’ United States hotel.
In 1854, three years after they had left Chicago, the Fords returned to the Windy City to start over.
Barney Ford Goes West: 1860
In 1860, Barney and Julia Ford were still in Chicago. By now, they had two kids, Sadie and Lewis Napoleon, and a successful livery business—that’s like a car rental company, only with horses and (optional) carriages.
Now Barney sold the business, and split the $2, 200 proceeds with Julia.
But they weren’t divorcing, or even officially separating.
The plan was for Barney to go West, and then send for the family.
Leaving half the money with Julia, to support her and the kids, Barney took the other half as seed money for a start-up business out West.
This time, the destination was not California, since the California Gold Rush was now old news. Instead, Barney plotted a course for Colorado, where gold had been discovered just two years earlier, and to where a big rush began in 1859, the year before his departure from Chicago.
This time, Barney Ford traveled by land. But he did so a decade after the Frinks, who had made the perilous journey overland in possibly the fanciest wagon ever to hit the trail, but who nonetheless faced a dangerous and lonely journey in 1850.
Things had improved by 1860, and like Ledyard Frink, Barney Ford had no interest in roughing it any more than he had to. Unlike Ledyard, he had modern choices in transportation.
He took a train from Chicago headed for the Missouri River. From Fort Leavenworth, he would take a stagecoach to Colorado. Simple.
Not simple. You see, the similarities between Barney Ford and Ledyard Frink end on the overland trail.
This was 1860, just one year before the American Civil War.
And, unlike Ledyard Frink, Barney Ford was Black.
Barney Launcelot Ford was the name he proudly adopted, but when he was born into slavery in January, 1822, in Virginia, he was known only as Barney. Slave trafficking took young Barney to South Carolina, where he grew up, and then to work on a steamboat on the Mississippi.
One day, Barney walked away from the boat, and from slavery, with the help of the Underground Railroad, a network of Black and white abolitionists. He got himself to Chicago, where Henry O. Wagoner, a Black Underground Railroad activist and successful barber, mentored him in both activism and barbering.
Barney married Julia, and took his new name. Not long afterward, in 1851, the couple set off on that journey that would land them in Greytown, Nicaragua.
So let's be clear. While Barney Ford and Ledyard Frink had quite a bit in common—they were both thirty-somethings who had migrated to the Midwest, they were entrepreneurial and mobile, they were keen to go West and make money from gold miners, and they went into the hotel/restaurant business around the same time—Ford faced huge challenges that Frink did not because he was Black. Not that he let that stop him.
An example of those challenges: The reason why the Fords did not head for Nicaragua via riverboat to New Orleans, was that a riverboat down the Mississippi would have taken them through the South. With very good reason, they feared kidnap into slavery. That's why the Fords took that very roundabout route from Chicago via New York.
Now, in 1860, on his way to Colorado, Barney Ford hit another racist snag: The stagecoach company out of Fort Leavenworth, in what was then the Kansas territory, would not take a Black passenger, no matter how light-skinned he was, or how much money he had for his ticket.
Barney Ford, wealthy entrepreneur and would-be migrant to Denver, was stranded.
So he waited patiently for a covered wagon train instead, one that might let him join as a passenger. Finally, a wagon train arrived: a group of overlanders with twenty-two covered wagons, all headed for Denver.
Wait for it.
Most of these travelers were pro-slavery white Southerners.
They nonetheless took on Barney Ford, not as a passenger, but as a cook. You can practically hear him rolling his eyes. Not shockingly, this former slave turned confident capitalist clashed with his fellow travelers/diners all the way to Denver. One can only imagine that they needed his services preparing meals too much to kick him out.
Honestly, if Mel Brooks or his writers had known about Barney Ford, this wagon train would surely have made an appearance in Blazing Saddles.
What happened to Barney Ford next, in Colorado, is a magnificent story in itself, one that you need to read in Shirley Ann Wilson Moore’s Sweet Freedom’s Plains: African-Americans on the Overland Trails, 1841-1869, on which this post is based. Whether you read Moore’s book straight from cover to cover, or just dip in to savor her wonderful stories, this book will affect how you think about American history.
While you reserve Sweet Freedom’s Plains at the library, order it online or by phone from your favorite non-A____n bookseller, or, I won’t shame you, buy it at the dreaded A_____n to help fund Jeff Bezos hurling old celebrities into space, I'll wait.
Right, let's get started on our second tantalizing story of Black Americans’ westward journey, the focus of Dr. Moore’s splendid book.
Biddy Mason’s Journey to Los Angeles, and Liberation
Bridget “Biddy” Mason’s life did not begin promisingly. She was born into slavery in Mississippi, seemingly condemned to a miserable life in the antebellum South. A mother to three young girls, Biddy wouldn’t run away without her kids, even if that option seemed feasible. And she was trafficked by slaveowners. All this made her the kind of enslaved person whom it was hardest for abolitionists to help, who was least likely to escape slavery's clutches.
Yet Biddy Mason ended her life as a successful and beloved community treasure in Los Angeles.
How did that happen?
The story begins with Biddy Mason's journey West. There was nothing straightforward about it.
Today, to get to California, we might hop a flight on the East Coast, and arrive within hours in L.A., a little tired, but our lives basically unchanged.
Biddy Mason’s journey across the West could not have been more different from ours: It was long, complicated, and uncertain, and it took her from slavery to freedom on an astonishing route that nobody could have predicted, including her.
Biddy Mason’s story is not just about one woman, although it is her story, one in which her determination and courage carried her at crucial moments. It’s also a story of the West, of the combined efforts of free Blacks, aided by sympathetic Latinos and whites in authority, determined to do the right and legal thing. And it’s really the most California story I think I’ve ever read.
Opportunity for Biddy Mason began when she left Mississippi. Her owner, Robert Smith, and his wife, had, like many people in the 1840s, became involved in one of the new religious and utopian movements of the period, and converted to Mormonism. They now decided to relocate to Salt Lake City.
When the Smiths set off West in 1848, they brought the people they owned. Biddy, her kids (aged 10, 4, and a breastfeeding baby), her sister, and seven other enslaved people, having no choice in the matter, accompanied them, heading first to Nebraska, and then on to Salt Lake City, where Mormons had taken refuge and established their own settlement after being harassed and murdered in New York and Illinois.
Along the way, Biddy served as company midwife. This wasn’t purely an honorary title. There were several pregnant women in the wagon train, at least three of them white, and some will have given birth along the trail. Biddy and her sister, Hannah, continued to practice midwifery for Black and white women after their arrival in Salt Lake City.
Three years after their arrival, Biddy, Hannah, the kids, and extended family members totalling thirteen enslaved people were, once again, involuntarily on the move. But this time, their journey held out the possibility of the greatest opportunity of all: Freedom.
Their owner, Robert Smith, was one of a group of Mormons in Salt Lake City charged in 1851 with starting a new settlement, this time in San Bernardino, California, near Los Angeles. And he and his wife again took with them the enslaved people they owned, including Biddy Mason, her sister, and their children.
As Mormon leader Brigham Young warned Smith, slavery was not legal in the new state of California. But Biddy and Hannah didn’t know that.
And Smith was not about to tell them.
Others, however, were happy to bring Biddy and family up to speed.
Biddy Mason’s 1851 Journey Across Sweet Freedom’s Plains and Thwarted Promise of Freedom
Bridget “Biddy” Mason’s journey to freedom literally began on the emigrant trail across the Western deserts. And it began with a Black community, centered in California, that reached out to offer her support, starting on the trail.
Traveling with Biddy’s party was Charles H. Rowan, a free Black man who served as a teamster, managing the wagon train’s animals. They had plenty of time to talk between Salt Lake City and San Bernardino, because in addition to serving as company midwife, Biddy was charged with herding the cattle that walked behind the wagon train, a tiring and dusty business from which, no doubt, she was happy to be distracted.
Charles Rowan had an urgent message that he impressed on Biddy Mason: Claim your freedom as soon as you get to California. Go to court. You will win. Do it.
Not surprisingly, Biddy did not do that. She was perhaps unsure of how to pursue her case, and certainly was afraid of the very real revenge that Smith, her owner, would exact on her.
Once in California, however, she gradually became acquainted with the free Black community of Los Angeles, including horse and mule trader Robert Owens, who employed ten Mexican cowboys, and his wife, Minnie. The Owens’ son started dating Biddy’s eldest daughter, Ellen, now 17, while the Owens’s friend Manuel Pepper, a free Black cowboy, started courting Biddy’s teenage niece, Ann.
But then Smith announced to the slaves that he intended to remove them to Texas. It was a slave state.
Smith started the move in late 1855, isolating the people he enslaved, including Biddy, Hannah, and their kids, in a remote camp in the Santa Monica mountains.
Having isolated them, he began preparing to traffic them to Texas,
But Biddy had told her friends of Smith’s plans. And this is where a remarkable California story becomes even more so.
Robert Owens and Charles H. Rowan, the teamster Biddy had met on the trail, swung into action. They told the Los Angeles county sheriff that slaves were being held, illegally, in the mountains.
They went further. They formed a posse on horseback, led by the sheriff, and including Robert Owens, his brother Charles, Manuel Pepper, and several of the Mexican cowboys Owens employed, They raided the camp in the mountains. They rescued Biddy, her family, and all the other slaves, who were then taken under the sheriff’s protection.
I mean to say, just picture this: A white Mississippi slaveowner watches, aghast, as his slaves are rescued from him by a group of Black and Mexican men, led by a white sheriff.
Like everywhere, California has a complicated history when it comes to race.
But this? Just wow.
You go, guys. Cheering you on, retroactively, as you gallop into the mountains on your remarkable mission, and into history.
Taking Her Case to Court in California
Biddy Mason and her family had been illegally enslaved in a free state for five years.
But 1856 was a new year, and Biddy Mason found the remarkable courage to speak.
On January 19, 1856, Bridget Mason petitioned for freedom, for herself and her family, to the Los Angeles district court, presided over by Judge Benjamin Hayes. He, too, had come to California in a wagon train.
There was a snag. “Free state” didn’t mean “non-racist” state. Black Californians were not allowed to testify against whites in open court.
So Judge Hayes got round that roadblock: He invited Biddy and family to testify in his chambers.
No matter how kindly Judge Hayes might have been, this still must have been an intimidating environment for an enslaved woman raised in Mississippi: An important white man, who held her future in his hands, sitting behind a desk, and her frightening white owner waiting in the courtroom down the hall.
But Biddy spoke, and her words speak volumes of the fear and gaslighting that slaveowners used to control people they owned. At the same time, Biddy Mason was liberating herself, allowing herself, finally, to speak the truth, including calling her owner a liar.
“I have always done what I have been told to do. I always feared this trip to Texas, since I first heard of it. Mr. Smith told me I would be just as free in Texas as here.”
Her very presence in court had already made it clear that Biddy Mason had not believed Smith’s lies.
Judge Hayes wasn’t stupid. When Biddy’s sister Hannah refused to testify, even in his chambers, he knew she was terrified of Smith. So he ruled that he would take “the speaking silence of the petitioners” as testimony. Emboldened, Hannah now broke even that “speaking silence”, telling the judge out loud that “she never wished to leave, and prays for protection.”
Three days after the court first sat, Judge Hayes gave his decision. As Shirley Moore notes in Sweet Freedom’s Plains, he did so a year before the United States Supreme Court ruled in the appalling Dred Scott decision that Black people “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
Judge Hayes thought differently. He declared that, in accordance with the constitution of California,
“. . . All of the said persons of color are entitled to their freedom, and are free forever.”
And he added that the only thing that
“remained was . . . for the petitioners to become settled and go to work for themselves in peace and without fear.”
Biddy, her family, and their loving community in Los Angeles took it from there. Biddy and her daughters lived with the Owenses until they could get on their feet. She soon took a job in Los Angeles with Judge Hayes’s brother-in-law, white Southern (and University of Pennsylvania-educated) physician John Strother Griffin. Hired as a midwife and nurse, Biddy earned a decent wage for a Black woman of her time: $2.50 a day.
A few years later, Biddy Mason bought herself a house in L.A., and, in the living room of that house, she and Charles Owens organized the First African Methodist Episcopal Church of Los Angeles. She paid the Church’s property taxes, and the salary of its minister.
But Biddy Mason herself continued to worship at the mostly white Fort Street Methodist Episcopal Church next to her house. Why? Because in Los Angeles, in freedom, Biddy Mason could do as she wished, and be who she pleased to an extent that would have been unfathomable in Mississippi.
Her generosity became legendary, and she was a leader in both the Black community of L.A. and the community at large. Imagine L.A. kids of all backgrounds growing up in the late 19th century, seeing a Black woman held in respect. Imagine the impact that had, no matter how consistently California failed to live up to its promise.
And it all started because Charles H. Rowan took the time to take Biddy Mason aside on the grueling, dusty trail from Utah to California, and tell her something she really needed to know: Her life mattered, and she should claim it. And Biddy Mason began to believe him.
Find Out More (and a special surprise!)
The focus of Shirley Ann Wilson Moore’s book, Sweet Freedom’s Plains: African-Americans on the Overland Trails, 1841-1860, is on those westward journeys, full of hope and promise, and that alone is a huge reason to buy this book. I find most Americans know very little about the overlanders’ journeys, including those taken by the white majority. The story of Black overlanders amplifies what they had in common with white migrants, and what they did not. It’s fascinating.
Go get this book. And while you’re waiting, tune in on Sunday, when I will be posting the video of my recent interview with the delightful Dr. Shirley Moore herself, from Sacramento! I kept our chat short, only twenty minutes (you have NO idea how hard that is for historians), but we packed a lot in, and a transcript will accompany it for the impatient among you.
PLUS, next Wednesday, I will release our interview as an audio podcast. However you want to learn what Dr. Moore has to say about Sweet Freedom’s Plains, we have you covered.
Once again. before you forget, here's the book:
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Biddy’s story would make a great movie!!