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By Root 527 0

West in the early 1830s. They, though, traveled with the Native Americans and were blacks who had melded with members of the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Muskogee-Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole) either as family members or as their slaves. They were a part of the forced marches to Indian Territory on the harrowing series of journeys known as the Trail of Tears. For these blacks, it began in 1831 with the first phase: the voluntary removal of the Choctaw Nation. It continued until 1838, when sixteen thousand Cherokees were forcibly taken from Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina, and Georgia and resettled in what is today’s Oklahoma. In 1832, George W. Harkins, a Choctaw, wrote in A Farewell Letter to the American People, “We as Choctaws rather chose to suffer and be free, than live under the degrading influence of laws, which our voice could not be heard in their formation.” Surely his words resonated with the African Americans who traveled westward with the Indians and with all those enslaved in the South.

Two years after the 1848 Gold Strike in California that began the Gold Rush, the West continued to look best for yet another group of African Americans. California was admitted to the Union in 1850 as a free state. That year only one thousand blacks lived in the state of California, but by 1860, three thousand more had joined them, settling in the San Francisco and Sacramento areas. However, the compromise that admitted California to the Union as a free state resulted in harsher fugitive slave laws that contributed to greater repression of blacks enslaved and free in the North and the South. In the decades leading up to the 1860 secession of the Southern states and the Civil War, the country was increasingly polarized over the question of slavery, and the division was being played out in the western territories that were open for settlement.

California was free, as were Oregon Territory and Washington Territory; the issue was unresolved in the territories of New Mexico and Utah, and the question of enslavement in the Kansas and Nebraska territories was to be determined by popular sovereignty. Freedom was not guaranteed, as laws changed and territories filled with white settlers of varying political views.

Yet, blacks continued to trickle westward; they headed for Oregon Territory and journeyed to Colorado for the Pike’s Peak Gold Rush of 1859. Following Emancipation, the trickle became a steady flow, including the cowboys, those who worked on the railroads that connected the again-reunited country, the homesteaders, and the Buffalo Soldiers who protected them. By the last decades of the nineteenth century, the westward migration had swollen to a wave. Relocating blacks found jobs and created employment in the areas of service where once they had toiled in bondage. They worked in fields, where their ingenuity and cultural flexibility allowed them freedom. They worked on the nascent railroads and in hotels and in boarding houses. They catered to miners and homesteaders, settlers and outlaws, and opened restaurants and saloons in the small towns and cities that were springing up along the routes west. Along with their omnipresent desire for equality, the African Americans brought with them in their heads, their hands, and their hearts the African-inspired and American-inflected tastes of their former Southern homes.

Among the first to arrive in the western territories were the black cowboys who had worked in Texas and the Indian Territories before the Civil War. They had come as slaves, brought by their Anglo masters after 1845, when the in dependent republic was folded into the United States. A second wave of ranch hands, single, able-bodied men, came post-Emancipation. Both groups found work moving cows down the cattle trails, which emerged at the end of the Civil War, as routes of commerce expanded and central slaughterhouses were developed at burgeoning rail hubs that would take the meat to the rest of the country.

Interestingly, an archetype as quintessentially American as the Western cowboy may owe