Westward Ho!

In 1851, a black prospector named Peter Brown wrote to his wife back in Missouri about the success he was having in the gold fields near Sacramento. Flush with the satisfaction of being his own boss and bringing in $300 in just a few months, he declared California to be “the best place for black folks on the globe.” “All a man has to do,” he said, “is to work, and he will make money.”

If only it were that simple. As Quintard Taylor demonstrates in his comprehensive and compelling book, “In Search of the Racial Frontier,” the West has always been a problematic place for African Americans. It is a promised land of opportunity for many but hardly a safe haven from the racism that has long scarred American society. People of African descent have been prominent players in shaping the history of the West for more than four centuries, but they have never been able to ignore that their identity as African Americans shaped their experience as Western Americans.

In addition to covering a vast amount of time and territory, Taylor confronts two of the most troublesome terms in today’s historical profession: “race” and “frontier.” He is careful to note that “race” is not reserved for references to African Americans alone. Much of the “striking ambiguity about race in the West,” he argues, “stems from the presence of four groups of color--African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos and Native Americans--all of whom interact with Anglos in varied ways over the centuries and throughout the region.” Having said that, though, Taylor turns his attention almost exclusively to African Americans; other people of color enter the narrative primarily to the extent that they interact with blacks.

One recurring example of that “striking ambiguity” is the relationship between African Americans and Native Americans. From the early days of Spanish conquest through the colonial period, intermarriage made racial identity almost impossibly imprecise. Spanish colonial officials tried to preserve racial distinctions in complex bureaucratic categories--developing a perplexing panoply of terms to designate the products of various intercultural couplings--but there were precious few people of “pure” African blood, just as there were few”pure” Spaniards. Still, Taylor notes, “the quintessential mark of status was to be considered espan~ol rather than mulatto, mestizo, Indian, or black.” Like Native Americans, African Americans could never fully escape the stigma assigned to people of color, no matter whom they married.

By the early part of the 19th century, with the advent of slaveholding settlers, race relations in the West remained far from rigidly defined. Anglo slave owners in antebellum Texas may have been less willing than their Spanish predecessors to intermarry with their black chattel, but they nonetheless shared a common concern (and apparently a common fate) in confronting the native population: “The much-feared Comanche made no distinction between the black and white frontier settlers . . . [and] regarded whites and blacks with antipathy and contempt and killed men and captured women and children with scant regard to color.” In fact, some of the staunchest supporters of slavery in the region were Native Americans, especially the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole settlers of the government-defined Indian Territory north of Texas. Forced out of their homelands in the Southeast by the Indian removal treaties of the 1830s, these unwilling immigrants brought black slaves with them and perpetuated the slavery practices they had carried on for more than a century. But even these practices differed considerably from tribe to tribe. Seminole slave owners allowed their black slaves a “wide latitude of action and considerable influence within tribal society,” while Cherokee masters tended to be much more stringent. Indeed, when the Civil War threatened to undermine the institution of slavery, the Native American inhabitants of Indian Territory were as divided as their European American counterparts.

The Civil War provides the context for a brief but intriguing description of interracial activity during an engagement in Indian Territory, the Battle of Honey Springs, on July 17, 1863. Facing a Confederate (and largely Texan) force of 6,000 men stood white Coloradans, pro-Union Cherokees and, in the center of the Union line, 500 free blacks of the 1st Kansas Colored Infantry, all waiting in shoulder-high prairie grass. Although the Texans’ attack tore gaping holes in the 1st Kansas’ line, the black soldiers held their ground, and the Confederates were defeated. In the aftermath of the bloodshed, the Union forces discovered that the Confederates had brought shackles into battle, presumably to take the black Kansans into slavery. This single Civil War scene offers an impressive image of European American, Native American and African American Westerners allied against a common (and equally Western) foe, standing together in battle yet distinct in their respective racial identities. It is one of the best and most arresting passages in the book.

While the North-South struggle over slavery highlights the many manifestations of race relations, Taylor’s search for the racial frontier also leads him to an East-West axis. Here Taylor might have been tempted to portray the West, as Frederick Jackson Turner did in his famous 1893 essay on “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” as a land of openness and innovation, where people of color could be freed from the shackles of the past. But Taylor wisely steers clear of this interpretation, choosing instead to offer a more ambivalent, even ambiguous, appraisal of the racial frontier. For one thing, he notes that during the three centuries of Spanish colonization, hundreds of thousands of blacks got to the West not by migrating from the East but by moving northward from Mexico. More to the point, parts of the 19th and 20th century West reflected the racial traditions of the American South. The old slaveholding areas, especially Texas and Oklahoma Territory, retained the worst attributes of Southern racism long after slavery was abolished. The post-Reconstruction era in Texas, for instance, brought the same kinds of legislated segregation--with separate but unequal schools and public facilities and a racially rigged political process--that were common in Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia.

Texas may not be everyone’s idea of the typical Western state, of course, but Taylor makes it a compelling point of reference for evaluating the progress of racial equality in other parts of the West. By 1910, “Houston’s 23,929 [African American] residents exceeded the combined black population of the five largest cities in the West,” yet the city’s Jim Crow controls kept them clearly in a subservient situation. In 1928, when Houston hosted the Democratic National Convention, black delegates were confined behind a chicken-wire fence. Fifteen years later, in 1943, a woman named Bertha Walker took the train west from Houston, and when she reached the Texas-New Mexico border at El Paso, another passenger reassured her that she could relax, “because we’re at the Mason-Dixon line.”

That notion that black people defined a second Mason-Dixon line separating the West from the South suggests that, apart from Texas and Oklahoma, the rest of the West could be considered a region of comparative equality. Indeed it was, argues Taylor, but only comparative. Throughout the second half of the book, as Taylor ranges widely over the post-Civil War West, he gives us numerous examples of the ways African Americans made significant achievements by creating their own communities, social institutions and occupational opportunities within the broader context of a sometimes hostile, almost always skeptical white society. From Kansas to California, from school-building to shipbuilding, from jobs to jazz, the results of African American activity in the West were impressive--sometimes inconclusive, admittedly, but always impressive.

So, ultimately, is Taylor’s book. He states at the outset that he is not content to be a member of the “recognition school” by simply pointing out that black people did indeed live and do something in the West. (Sometimes, unfortunately, even recognition becomes a bit blurry: Too often Taylor runs so rapidly through an era-by-era, state-by-state, city-by-city survey that his grasp for breadth leaves the reader gasping for breath, wishing for a pause and a closer look at the details and textures of individual and community stories.)

He makes a convincing and certainly comprehensive case for the place of African Americans in Western history, not just as inhabitants but as participants who helped shape the modern face of the region and who contributed greatly to its decided multiculturalism. In the end, though, he remains unwilling, or perhaps understandably unable, to evaluate exactly what the Western states offered (and now offer) them. Rather than accept the West as “a racial frontier beyond which lay the potential for an egalitarian society,” Taylor leaves the issue open. No doubt he knows that Turner’s assessment that the American frontier had “closed” in 1890 was certainly premature and that it would be equally misguided to declare the West’s racial frontier closed in the 1990s.

That being the case, the last word might well belong to James Weldon Johnson, whom Taylor quotes on the first page of the introduction. Writing to the Denver Post in 1925, Johnson, national secretary of the NAACP, observed, “Your West is giving the Negro a better deal than any other section of the country.” What Johnson didn’t say--and probably didn’t have to say--was that “better” doesn’t necessarily mean “good.”