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itself across the continent. Pullman’s hotel cars included a kitchen that measured three feet by six feet, a pantry, and even a wine cellar, in which the crew of four or five created an amazing variety of dishes, considering the cramped quarters. The cars were successful, but the elite felt that eating should be separated from sleeping, and the hotel cars were gradually phased out and replaced with new dining cars devoted exclusively to serving food. The first was named the Delmonico, in honor of the famous New York restaurant, which was the epitome of dining elegance. Pullman’s original hotel cars arrived on the tracks shortly after Emancipation and offered employment for many newly emancipated house servants in the domestic roles that they had defined under enslavement. Writing in 1917’s The History of the Pullman Car, Joseph Husband declared that “the Pullman Company is today the greatest single employer of colored labor in the world.” He continued, in terms that speak eloquently of the prevailing views on African Americans, noting they are “trained as a race for by years of personal service in various capacities, and by nature adapted faithfully to perform their duties under circumstances which necessitate unfailing good nature, solicitude, and faithfulness.”

The railroads, as they grew, provisioned their passengers and developed their own regional specialties. Long before “fresh” and “local” and “regional” became the bywords of a twenty-first-century culinary generation, the trains were creating menus that reflected their routes. Travelers could dine on ripe figs in California, Dunge-ness crab in Oregon, and fresh-caught trout in Idaho.

The railroads offered employment and another way for African Americans and their food to travel westward. By the end of the century, African Americans excelled in dining cars as cooks and as waiters, gaining secure jobs in difficult times and often receiving travel benefits for family members at reduced rates. In the later part of the nineteenth century, as train employees moved about the country and established themselves and their families at terminus spots like California’s Oakland and Los Angeles and Washington’s Seattle, they became the avant garde for the early-twentieth-century wave of black migration.

The success of Ford, like that of Mary Ellen Pleasant, was based on serving food to the white upper classes. Those who worked in the Pullman cars also catered to the elite; they were praised for their taste and flair, but most of the menus served had little to do with the recipes of Africa or the plantation foods of the antebellum South and were inspired by the prevailing taste and ideas of grand dining in Europe. They and others like them lived and made their fortunes in the West’s burgeoning cities, rode in railroad cars, and supped in fancy eateries.

Most blacks who journeyed westward were too impoverished to pay the rail fares. They went instead by wagon and cart and all too often simply on foot. The region also offered them jobs at small settlements that boasted a saloon or a boardinghouse, a general store, and perhaps a stagecoach post. This was the West of the homesteaders: the everyday, ordinary folk on whose backs the region was built. The black homesteaders were largely made up of former slaves and those seeking new land and opportunities, and their fragile existence on the plains was subject to Indian raids and outlaws, dust storms and droughts. Africa’s tastes came to the West in the cast iron skillets and Dutch ovens of these black homesteaders who emigrated post-Emancipation. These new Westerners found themselves in small towns and enclaves and remote settlements where they depended on the protection of their neighbors and of the army in the form of the Buffalo Soldiers.

The legendary Ninth and Tenth Regiments of the United States Cavalry were founded by General Grant in 1866, the former in the Division of the Gulf and the latter in the Division of Missouri. White officers willing to command black troops were difficult to find, and many—like George Custer of Little