Tough History

 African Americans journeyed West with the gold rush and were a presence in Montana’s first communities. While some were freemen of color, some came as slaves with their white owners and others arrived after the Emancipation. The unspeakable, deep-seated tragedy of human commerce today is difficult to understand. The National Trust for Historic Preservation’s recent annual conference in Savannah, Georgia, offered a unique opportunity revisit this history. It was a powerful, thought provoking experience.

Although Savannah, settled in the 1739, initially banned slavery, the city and surrounding plantations desperately needed laborers. So slaves were imported from nearby South Carolina, and in 1749, the ban was lifted. Savannah became one of three major ports of entry for West African slaves.

Researcher and tour guide Karen B. Wortham of the Slave Dwelling Project, Inc., led a small group of us to some of the city’s little-known places related to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. She recounted Savannah’s darker, gut-wrenching past and showcased the places that served the lucrative industry of human commerce.

Savannah's River Street barracoons were holding areas for slaves newly arrived from West Africa.

Among the places we visited, the River Street “barracoons” vividly interpret this appalling history. The word comes from the Spanish barracón, or barracks, where slaves awaiting transport were held. After the grueling passage before arriving at port, traders separated the sick and weak. Some they quarantined, but others they chained together and tossed overboard. Men, women, and children healthy enough to work were then chained and “stored” in these cave-like holding areas until public auction.

The barracoons are built of gray Savannah bricks made by slaves whose fingerprints are sometimes found in the clay.

We ended at the nation’s oldest black church, the First African–Baptist Church, where Karen shared its long and impressive history. In the square across the street, Martin Luther King practiced his “I Have a Dream” speech. The current historic church building dates to 1855, and its sanctuary is elegant in its sober simplicity. Downstairs in the fellowship hall, West African Congo cosmograms—diamond-shaped prayer symbols—drilled into the wooden floor, were intended to appear as part of religious ritual. However, they actually served as air holes for runaway slaves concealed below.
Learn more about slavery in Savannah and the rich history of the church here.

Friday Photo: Dry Cleaners

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, Mulvaney Collection, 1723

This Helena tailoring shop probably belonged to Miles York. The date on the calendar is, unfortunately, not legible. It might be July 1910.

The Gordons of White Sulphur Springs, Part II

Taylor was the youngest of the Gordon children. He led both a charmed and tragic life.  His adventures began when John Ringling—of circus fame—came to town with his chauffeur, John Spencer. Spencer taught Gordon how to be a mechanic, which led to a job as chauffeur and mechanic for the president of the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. Taylor eventually worked as chef for Ringling and traveled with the circus. He quit that to take a very strange job with the federal government, escorting a mental patient to Barbados in the British West Indies. Everything was fine until they arrived in Barbados. The patient insisted that Gordon was the one with the mental illness, and Gordon himself very nearly ended up the inmate in the asylum. Gordon made a name for himself as a talented gospel singer and performed in a popular vaudeville act in the 1920s. He toured Europe with his singing group until the group disbanded, and then he appeared on Broadway in several productions. He also published an autobiography, Born To Be. But his career fell apart and during World War II, Gordon worked as a lathe operator at a B-29 factory in New Jersey. In 1947 he suffered a breakdown and spent twelve years in a mental hospital.

Gordon returned home to White Sulphur Springs in 1959, gave a few Montana concerts, and continued his writing, but his only other publication was a history of the Castle, a local landmark built by B. R. Sherman. Taylor Gordon died quietly in 1971. Unlike some other African American Montanans, Gordon did not experience much prejudice and discrimination growing up. Gordon wrote that although he knew his dark skin made him different, his childhood was very happy, and he was always free to associate with people of all nationalities, creeds, and colors. “The Race Question,” Gordon wrote in Born to Be, “has never been the big ghost in my life!”

The Gordons of White Sulphur Springs, Part I

Mary Gordon of White Sulphur Springs was born a slave in Kentucky in 1853. Her husband John was a free person of color who came from Scotland to the United States with his employer. A trained chef, he worked as chef and baker in White Sulphur Springs’ Higgins House, the town’s main hotel. In 1895, he took a job as chef for a Canadian railway and died in a train accident just before the birth of the Gordons’ fifth child, Taylor. Mary took in laundry, provided nursing care for the community, and cooked fine dinners for parties given by the town’s elite.

Mary Gordon. Montana Historical Society Research Center vertical file

Daughter Rose did the serving. The tables were always set with an array of knives and forks, and miners and cattlemen were often at a loss as to what to do with all this silverware. They would ask Mrs. Gordon and she would always tell them to watch the host and do what he or she did. Mrs. Gordon loved to tell how once an old miner, who was a dinner guest at a fancy banquet, drank from his finger bowl. Rose, one of the five Gordon children, wanted desperately to be a doctor. She graduated valedictorian from the local high school in 1903, and had great potential, but never had enough money to go to medical school. Instead she became a physical therapist and practical nurse. She also owned a café and was a great cook.  She had a great sense of humor, too, as the back of one of her business cards reveals.

Montana Historical Society Research Center vertical file

African Americans in Montana

Several instances of the presence of African Americans in the territory before the major gold rushes are known. William Clark’s slave, York, traveled with the Lewis and Clark Expedition in 1805–1806, Henry “Negro Henry” Mills worked for the American Fur Company in Fort Benton from the late 1850s, James Beckwourth was a well-known trapper of the 1820s and 1830s whose life has been the subject of some interest, and Isaiah Dorman served as a Sioux interpreter for the army who fell with Custer at Little Bighorn. Blacks also often worked on the steamboats that traveled widely up and down the Missouri River and docked at Fort Benton.

James Beckwourth. Photo courtesy Nevada Historical Society.

With Emancipation in 1865, African Americans realized new opportunities and joined the westward migrations. While small in numbers, these pioneers contributed significantly to their communities. In 1870, the federal census counted 183 black people in Montana. The number doubled in 1880, reached 1,490 in 1890, and peaked in 1910 at 1,834. Western blacks, many of whom carried the burden of slavery, tended to settle in Montana’s larger urban areas and founded communities within a sometimes hostile and discriminatory larger society. Against the backdrop of the Civil War, blacks often found themselves caught in the bitter struggle between Democrats and Republicans who in theory supported African American equality, but did so in varying degrees. School segregation, black suffrage (achieved in 1867), and anti-miscegenation laws were controversial racial issues in Montana’s early territorial period. Finding consolation and community together, black citizens often established their own churches, benevolent societies, newspapers, and social clubs.

The Montana Federation of Negro Women's Clubs meets in Butte, August 3, 1921.
Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, PAc 96-25.2

Despite the proportionately small numbers, the 1870 census shows that blacks on the Montana frontier engaged in diverse occupations and mostly concentrated in towns, especially Fort Benton and Helena. More than half of males listed their occupation as laborers, domestics, servants, or cooks, and twenty-seven percent represented themselves as barbers. A smaller percentage proffered their occupation as ranch hands, cowboys, and miners, with one listed as a saloon keeper. A decade later in 1880, blacks still clustered in the larger communities of Helena and Butte where mining activities necessarily attracted service providers and laborers. Fort Benton’s African American population jumped from twenty in 1870 to fifty in 1880 because of the steamboat travel that brought in population from diverse places and because of the employment opportunities steamboats offered.

Canyon Hotel waiters, Yellowstone National Park, 1901. Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, H-4873.

African Americans who came to Montana in the nineteenth century include William Taylor, a teamster, Samuel Lewis, a highly successful Bozeman barber, John Gordon, a trained chef, and James Crump who worked as a miner. African American women also came to Montana with the first settlers and some assumed non-traditional roles. For example, sisters Parthenia Sneed and Minerva Coggswell ran a Virginia City restaurant, Sarah Bickford eventually owned the Virginia City Water Company, Mary Gordon owned a restaurant in White Sulphur Springs, and Mary Fields drove the stage and held the mail route between Cascade and St. Peter’s Mission.

Mary Fields. Photo courtesy Ursuline Convent Archives, Toledo, Ohio.

In an interview in 1979 for the Helena Independent Record, Norman Howard, grandson of James Crump, reflected on what it was like to be black in Montana. He believed that discrimination was tougher for blacks than for Indians. While Montana never posted signs for “Whites Only” as in the South, the same rules applied and most blacks found menial employment as waiters, janitors, and hotel workers. Blacks were excluded from restaurants, bars, and barber shops. By virtue of such exclusion, tightly knit black communities formed; however, as the civil rights movement brought changes for the better, these communities slowly disappeared. Maintaining a strong black community also proved difficult as the lack of job opportunities in the state drew second and third generation blacks elsewhere.
Although Montana has made small gains in the last decade, 2012 statistics show this ethnic group makes up only 0.6% of the state’s population compared to 13.1% nationally.

Birdie Brown

The rutted road was a familiar one to Fergus County locals during the days of Prohibition. You had to be careful—bad hooch could cause blindness and even death. Those looking for a place to party knew to point their cars toward Black Butte and Birdie (or Bertie) Brown’s place. She was as nice a woman as they come, and her still—according to locals—produced some of the best moonshine in the country. Birdie was among a very small number of young African American women who homesteaded alone in Montana. She was in her twenties when she settled in the Lewistown area in 1898. She later homesteaded along Brickyard Creek in 1913.

Birdie Brown's Homestead in Fergus County. Courtesy Great Falls Tribune.

During Prohibition in the 1920s, Birdie carved a niche for herself. Her neat homestead where she lived with her cat was a place of warm hospitality. Birdie’s parlor was legendary. In May 1933, just months before the end of Prohibition and Birdie’s livelihood, the revenue officer came around and warned her to stop her brewing. But as Birdie multitasked, dry cleaning some garments with gasoline and tending what would be her last batch of hooch, the gasoline exploded in her face. She lived a few hours, long enough to request that someone take care of her beloved pet. But the cat that followed her everywhere was never found. Birdie’s once orderly homestead now lies in a state of collapse, tragically transformed into a ghost of its former self. Roundup artist Jane Stanfel, who has painted Birdie’s homestead, makes a strange observation. Although it’s been nearly eighty years since Birdie’s passing, every so often someone catches a glimpse of a black cat perched in her parlor window.

Annie Morgan

Legend has it that African American Annie Morgan was a cook for General George Armstrong Custer. After the Battle of the Little Bighorn, she was out of a job and eventually made her way to Philipsburg in Granite County. This part of the story has been disputed, and Annie’s past is uncertain. However, it is a fact that Granite County attorney David Durfee hired her to take his uncle—who had a severe drinking problem—to an abandoned fox farm on Upper Rock Creek to dry out. Annie cared for the uncle, accomplished a cure, and when he eventually went his own way, she stayed on, filing a homestead claim.

Annie's cabin. Photo courtesy State Historic Preservation Office

One day in 1894, Annie happened upon a local character named Joseph Case, lying on the banks of Rock Creek gravely ill with typhoid. Case was a Civil War veteran from New Jersey who made a living catching fish to sell in Philipsburg where he was known as “Fisher Jack.” Annie nursed Jack through the illness, and to repay her, Jack fenced Annie’s homestead. The pair developed a mutual affection, and when the fence was done, Jack stayed on. Annie died in 1914, and both she and Jack are buried in the Philipsburg cemetery. The Forest Service has beautifully restored Annie’s cabin. In the process, workers discovered a curious object hidden in the upper door frame. Bits of red string, a soap wrapper, and other items consistent with the bundles carried by African root doctors suggest that perhaps Annie carried these traditions, handed down to her from family members, to the Montana frontier. She certainly proved her skills at doctoring. The Morgan-Case Homestead, listed in the National Register of Historic Places, is available for short-term rental by lottery through the Missoula Ranger District.

P.S. If you're interested in staying at the cabin, watch this video.

Octavia Bridgewater

The Army Nurse Corps formed in 1901, and African American nurses served throughout all wars. However, they served as contract nurses and not in the military. At the end of World War I, when the Spanish flu epidemic caused a severe shortage of nurses, the Army Nurse Corps accepted eighteen African American women after Armistice to care for German prisoners of war and African American soldiers stateside.  In 1941, the Army Nurse Corps began accepting a few African American nurses. In 1942, there were 8,000 black nurses in the United States. The Army’s strict quota, however, allowed only 160 to enlist. One of the first black nurses accepted for active duty was Octavia Bridgewater of Helena. She served from January 11, 1943, until November 29, 1945.

Octavia Bridgewater is standing on the far right in this 1926 photo, probably taken in Colorado Gulch near Helena.
Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, PAc 2002-36 11

Octavia received her nurses training at the Lincoln Hospital School of Nursing in the Bronx in the late 1920s.  At that time, the Lincoln School and the Harlem School of Nursing were the only two schools exclusively for African Americans. Even so, both were under white administration. When Octavia returned to Montana after graduation in 1930, her only option was private duty nursing. After her enlistment in the Army, Octavia and her colleagues realized that if the military quota situation was not lifted, black nurses could never be integrated into the mainstream medical community after the war. Nationally through the black press, these women mobilized for their cause. Slowly, African American nurses pierced the barriers within the military system. The Army and Navy lifted the boycott in 1945. Octavia returned to civilian life to give many years of service to the Helena community as a maternity nurse at St. Peters Hospital. She was also very involved in Montana’s vibrant black community. Octavia was especially proud to have been part of the national movement that helped pave the way for her own civilian nursing career and for the careers of many other black nurses.

Sarah Bickford Revisited

Historians have long told the story of Sarah Gammon Bickford. From slave to Virginia City businesswoman, her life was remarkable.  She was born in North Carolina, and when Sarah was young, her parents were sold and she never saw them again. After the Civil War, she traveled to Virginia City in 1871 as governess to the children of the John L. Murphy family. She soon married John Brown, a white miner, and they had three children. As the story goes, by 1881 two young sons and her husband had died. Her daughter Eva lived to be nine years old and then she died around 1883. Sarah started over, marrying Stephen Bickford, a miner and owner of the local water company. The couple had four children. Her children recalled that growing up, their mother told them poignant stories about her first family. Stephen died in 1900, leaving Sarah to run the water company. She was likely the only black woman in the nation to own a utility at that time.

But there is an epilogue to Sarah’s story. A diligent student researcher recently discovered divorce proceedings in the Madison County Courthouse. Even Sarah’s family apparently believed her first husband had died. But this proved that Sarah took her life into her own hands and charged her first husband with cruelty and abandonment. Samuel Word was her defense attorney. Her husband, John Brown, did not appear in court. Sarah accused him of threatening to kill her, beating her, and leaving her and her children. The judge granted her divorce and gave her sole custody of Eva, their only surviving child. The discovery of Sarah’s divorce gives a new dimension to the life of Sarah Bickford, and adds real courage to her other qualities.

 

P.S. Lots more research about Sarah Bickford at this blog, plus the Sarah Bickford house in Virginia City.

P.P.S. Remember this remarkable woman?

African Americans in Great Falls

Great Falls’ African American community and its prominent black citizens have amply contributed to the state’s history. African Americans established the Union Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1890. The small 40-member congregation raised funds door to door to build the current church in 1917. It became the religious and social heart of Great Falls’ black community. The church offered institutional support for those who took leading roles in the fight against segregation.

Union Bethel Church today. Photo courtesy State Historic Preservation Office.

In 1953, the Cascade County Community Council appointed a committee to study discrimination against black soldiers stationed at nearby Malmstrom Air Force Base. Although Montana had no Whites Only signs as there were in some places, blacks were not allowed in most businesses. An exception was Great Falls’ far-famed Ozark Club. From the 1940s until it burned in 1962, the Ozark Club was Montana’s only social club that employed integrated jazz bands and welcomed an interracial clientele. Great Falls’ black community made other important contributions. Among them, Alma Jacobs was elected the first black president of the Pacific Northwest Library Association in 1957. She was a founder of the Montana Committee for the Humanities, helped build the modern Great Falls Library, and became Montana’s State Librarian in 1974. Geraldine Travis of Great Falls was elected to the Montana House of Representatives, the first black person to serve in the legislature. Currently Great Falls has Montana’s largest African American population, partly because many black soldiers are stationed at Malmstrom Air Force Base. And after a period of declining membership, the Union Bethel Church—listed in the National Register of Historic Places—is now a vital part of the interracial community.

J. P. Ball and Son

In honor of Black History Month, today's post features a father-son team of photographers and their bold and unique statement of equality. Warning! The photos after the jump are shocking. I'd rate this post PG-13 for violence.

James Presley Ball was a professional photographer who came from Cincinnati to Montana in 1887 with his son, J.P. Ball, Jr. They set up a studio in Helena. They were talented and influential African Americans who left an interesting legacy. The younger Ball was the first editor of the Colored Citizen, a short-lived newspaper dedicated to capturing black endorsement of Helena as the state capital.

James Presley Ball. Photo from Calabash by Esther Hall Mumford

As photographers, the Balls documented events and people. They left portraits of prosperous Chinese, blacks, and European immigrants. They also took some curious photos. One bizarre three-photo sequence documents the tragedy of African American William Biggerstaff. The first portrait shows Biggerstaff as a prominent, well dressed gentleman in a suit and vest, posing confidently.

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives

Civil War Vets

In honor of our veterans...

Montana’s earliest African American population carried the very real memories of slavery and its associated implications. Most of the first black Montanans were born into slavery or had parents or ancestors who were slaves. Many of them saw service during the Civil War. Upon President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, the Union stepped up its recruitment of black volunteers. By the end of the Civil War, roughly 179,000 black men, or 10 percent of the Union Army, had served as soldiers, and another 19,000 had served in the Navy. Nearly 40,000 black soldiers died over the course of the war—30,000 of them succumbed to infection or disease. Black volunteers did many necessary jobs and earned a salary of ten dollars a month, with three dollars deducted for clothing. White soldiers received thirteen dollars a month with no deductions. Three black Union veterans who later made their homes in Montana were Jack Taylor of Virginia City, Moses Hunter of Miles City, and James Wesley Crump of Helena. In the Union Army, Jack Taylor took care of officers’ horses and learned the craft of teamster. Moses Hunter reenlisted after the war, served in the Southwest, and by 1939, was eastern Montana’s only living Civil War veteran. James Crump lied about his age and joined the Union Army. When his superiors discovered he was only fourteen, he convinced them to let him serve out his three-year term as a drummer. Crump thus was the youngest Civil War veteran in Montana, and because of this, he often carried the flag in parades and proudly held the flag at the laying of the cornerstone of the Montana State Capitol in 1902.


A buffalo soldier at the dedication of the Montana State Capitol in 1902
Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives

P.S. Remember this invention by buffalo soldier William D. Davis?
P.P.S. What about Mingo Sanders and the soldiers of the Twenty-fifth Infantry?

Horace W. Bivins

I've enjoyed celebrating Black History Month. To finish it out, here's a look at the accomplishments of Horace W. Bivins, plus more resources on Montana's black history.

Horace W. Bivins was born in Virginia of free ancestry and was college educated. He enlisted in the Tenth Cavalry, the famous Buffalo Soldiers, in 1887 as a noncommissioned officer. Bivins served in Arizona in campaigns against Geronimo. The Tenth Cavalry was reassigned to Fort Custer in Montana. There Bivins became famous as such an expert marksman that Buffalo Bill Cody tried to entice him to travel with his show. Bivins preferred the military. He was a veteran of two Cuban wars and three Philippine engagements. At the attack on San Juan Hill, he fought beside Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders and later received the Silver Star for his heroic actions. Some years later when Roosevelt visited Billings, he was disappointed to learn that Bivins was not at home, but at Camp Dix, New Jersey, commanding a labor battalion.

Photo from BlackPast.org

Bivins retired in 1913 and reenlisted at personal hardship in 1918 during World War I, retiring a second time as captain in 1919. Bivins’s record for marksmanship stood until the 1970s, and today remains one of the all-time highest. During his thirty-two-year career in the military, Bivins received thirty-two medals, one for every year of service. Bivins studied taxidermy at the University of Minnesota, practiced that for a while, and did extensive truck gardening in the Billings area where he lived a long, quiet life.

From Montana Moments: History on the Go

P.S. Remember the accomplishments of another Buffalo Soldier?
P.P.S. Here are a few places to start your own research into our state's black history:
The Montana Historical Society has a lot of resources on African Americans in Montana.

Historian Ken Robison has shared much of his research on his blog, Historical Fort Benton.

Blackpast.org has information on African Americans in Montana and nationwide, including some primary source documents.

Listen to a series of oral history interviews from the Washington State University Libraries.

Read an interesting tidbit about jazz and CCC workers in Libby here.

If you or your library have access to JSTOR, start with this article from the Spring 2007 issue of Montana The Magazine of Western History.

And of course, you can always look back at all the Montana moments labeled black history.
I'd love to know what you turn up in your research. Leave a comment!

John W. White

Today's Montana moment celebrates Black History Month with a look back at the life of John W. White of Kalispell.

Kalispell’s historic Central School today is home to the Northwest Montana Historical Society and serves as a community center and museum. But from 1894 to 1991, Central served students. Back in 1932 during the Great Depression, students of social science and history were studying the Civil War. The school’s longtime janitor, John W. White, knew a thing or two firsthand about one of the main issues. White was born a slave in North Carolina. He was ten when the war ended and freedom changed his life. He came west where he and his wife, Helen, settled in Demersville. They moved to Kalispell with its founding in 1891. White worked at Central School for more than thirty-five years. He had no formal schooling, but he was a self-taught scholar, an avid reader, and believed in education. He began his long workday at four A.M., and at the end of every day when the halls were quiet, he would take up his place by the furnace with a book in his hand and do some serious reading.


Image from the Museum at Central School

White, beloved by generations of Central children, saved his money to send four of his own children to college. But this special day in May, 1932, as White neared the end of his long life, he set aside his mops and brooms to tell the children about his own personal experiences. White’s lectures on slavery that day had the children riveted to their seats. He passed away two years later in 1934, but he left Central students with a perspective they did not forget.

From Montana Moments: History on the Go

Friday Photo

Our last Friday photo celebrating Black History Month shows waiters from the Canyon Hotel in Yellowstone National Park in 1901.


Photo courtesy Montana Historical Society photograph archives, H-4873. Photo by Elliott W. Hunter. Used by permission.

It's technically a Wyoming moment, but I'm posting it anyway because it's a glimpse of the African American experience in the West. Also, it's a great photo. Speaking of great photos, if you have a picture (or story) of a Montana moment that you'd like to share, be sure to email me! I'd love to hear from you.

Sarah Bickford

In celebration of Black History Month, here's a look at a remarkable woman.

Virginia City businesswoman Sarah Bickford was born into slavery. Her parents were sold when she was very young, and she never saw them again. After the Civil War, Sarah went to live with an aunt in Tennessee. She came west at age fifteen in the employ of the John L. Murphy family. Judge Murphy served briefly as associate justice in the territorial Supreme Court at Virginia City. Sarah took take care of the Murphys’ children on the journey west. The Murphys soon returned to the states, but Sarah stayed, working as a chambermaid in a Virginia City hotel. She once found a poke of gold dust worth fifteen hundred dollars mistakenly left by a hotel guest. She tracked him down and returned it, and the miserly miner gave her a reward of twenty-five cents.

From From Slave to Water Magnate by Marlette C. Lacey

Sarah married a miner and had three children, but by the 1880s, her entire family had died. In 1881 Sarah married Stephen Bickford, a miner and owner of the Virginia City Water Company. With Stephen she had two girls and a boy who grew up listening to poignant stories about their mother’s first set of children. When Stephen died in 1900, Sarah took over the water company. She kept her office in Virginia City’s famous Hangman’s Building until her death in 1931. Sarah Bickford was one of the first women, and perhaps the only black woman in the nation, to own a utility.

From Montana Moments: History on the Go

P.S. Lots more research about Sarah Bickford at this blog, plus the Sarah Bickford house in Virginia City.
P.P.S. Remember this remarkable woman?

Friday Photo

In celebration of Black History Month, here's a glimpse of Montana's African American community in 1921.

Photo courtesy Montana Historical Society photograph archives, PAc96-25.2

The first convenetion of the Montana Federation of Negro Women's Clubs was held in Butte on August 3, 1921. Photo by Zubick Art Studio.

Samuel Lewis

In celebration of Black History Month, today's post looks at the accomplishments of Samuel Lewis...

Samuel Lewis settled in Bozeman in 1868, joining a small population of African Americans who came to Montana after the Civil War. Lewis, a native of the West Indies, was a skilled barber, an expert sleight-of-hand performer, and a first-class musician. He established a thriving tonsorial parlor and bathhouse on Main Street. Lewis shared his success with his younger sister, Edmonia, financing her studies abroad. Highly acclaimed as one of the most gifted African American sculptors of the nineteenth century, Edmonia displayed her work at the 1894 Chicago Exposition. In 1889, Lewis transformed his modest home into a fine Queen Anne style showplace that reveals a high level of architectural sophistication. Its grand and beautifully maintained interior features a frescoed parlor ceiling, tin ceiling in the kitchen, and ornate woodwork.


From History of Montana, 1739-1885

 Completed in 1890, the Lewis residence was then and is now one of Bozeman’s most delightful homes. When Lewis died in 1896, he left an estate valued at twenty-five thousand dollars. It was a well-deserved fortune likely unparalleled by other contemporary African American Montanans.

From Montana Moments: History on the Go

Friday Photo

In celebration of Black History Month, here's a look back at one of the contributions of blacks in the military stationed in Montana. Tomorrow I’ll be giving a talk, “Vignettes of Valor,” profiling some more of those contributions. It's here at the Historical Society at 2:00. Hope you can make it!

 

From Montana Views. Original in Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, H-3614. Used by permission.

A group of bicyclists stands on Minerva Terrace in Yellowstone National Park in August 1896. The men belong to Lt. James A. Moss's company of the Twenty-fifth Infantry, U.S. Army Bicycle Corps, Fort Missoula, Montana. Photo by F. Jay Haynes.

P.S. It's possible that one of the men pictured is Mingo Sanders.
Update: Thanks to Mike Higgins for identifying the men in this photo. See his comment below for their names.

Mingo Sanders

Good morning history buffs! What are you up to this week? I’ll be giving a talk, “Vignettes of Valor,” profiling some of the contributions of blacks in the military stationed in Montana or with Montana connections. It will be here at MHS on Saturday, 2:00 PM, in celebration of Black History Month. This is the little-known story of Mingo Sanders,  one of these courageous men.

African American buffalo soldiers of the Twenty-fifth Infantry arrived at Fort Missoula in May of 1888. Some of these men participated in the famous bicycle experiment, riding 1,900 miles from Missoula to St. Louis in the summer of 1897. One of the key riders was Mingo Sanders, a 16-year army veteran.


From The Brownsville Raid by John D. Weaver.

Mingo Sanders (center, in uniform) with his baseball team at Fort Missoula.

Although partially blind from an explosion, Sanders had an excellent service record and the respect of his commanding officers. In 1898, the Twenty-fifth was ordered to Cuba at the start of the Spanish American War. Sanders and the Twenty-fifth distinguished themselves fighting alongside Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders at the Battle of San Juan Hill. Today historians credit the buffalo soldiers with saving the Rough Riders, who instead got all the press and praise, and Roosevelt, who got himself elected president. Sanders then served in the Philippine Insurrection and received the Medal of Honor for his heroic actions. In 1906, Sanders, stationed at Fort Brown, Texas, was a year away from his retirement and well-deserved pension. He and 166 others of the Twenty-fifth Infantry, many of them fellow members of the famous bicycle corps, were falsely accused of murdering a white bartender. Fabricated evidence and President Roosevelt’s political agenda led to their dishonorable discharge without a trial. The incident was known as the “Brownsville Affair.” Mingo Sanders, blind in one eye and diabetic, gave most of his life to his country, but never received his pension. He died in 1929 during the amputation of a gangrenous foot. Decades later in 1972, Congress reopened the case and found all 167 men innocent. They received honorable discharges posthumously and each received $25,000 in restitution, paid to their heirs.


Harper's Weekly, January 12, 1907

Sanders upon hearing the verdict.