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In anticipation of the @PBSAmerMasters Laura Ingalls Wilder doc airing tonight, I wrote about how racism is not "incidental" in the books, but the driving force of the narrative. (REALLY LONG THREAD) https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/in-promoting-the-myth-of-white-self-sufficiency-the-little-house-books-rewrite-history/16545/
I first became interested in the Black West because my great-grandparents were settlers. They came from Louisiana to Boley, Oklahoma in 1909, shortly after statehood. Boley was one one of the nearly fifty all-black towns that sprang up in Indian Territory following the Civil War.
Boley was founded on land donated by Abigail Barnett McCormick, who inherited the land from her father, James Barnett, a Creek Freedmen. Booker T. Washington made a tour of Indian Territory in 1905 and visited Boley, then wrote an effusive essay about it: https://wwnorton.com/college/history/archive/reader/trial/directory/1890_1914/04_ch19_05.htm
The McCormicks lived in a dugout, as did the Ingalls in "On the Banks of Plum Creek". Apparently there's a reproduction you can visit https://www.walnutgrove.org/ingalls-dugout-site.html
Boley was also home to Creek Seminole College, which opened in 1906 and served "Indians, Freedmen, and African Migrants". The college was founded on land donated by Lucinda Holloway, daughter of a Creek Freedwoman. She also married a McCormick. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/creek-seminole-college-1906-1925/
In an completely different story, Abigail's husband H.C. McCormick killed Pretty Boy Floyd associate George Birdwell when Boley's Farmers & Merchants Bank was robbed in 1932. My great-grandfather (right) was bookkeeper at F&M, but had left to become bursar at Langston University.
You can REALLY get off-track when you are talking about Boley. Anyway, here's this fascinating film by Solomon Sir Jones featuring the students of Boley High in 1925 in which my grandmother and grand-uncles march by. My grandmother is at 9:55 or so http://brbl-archive.library.yale.edu/exhibitions/celluloidwest/SolomonSirJones/Film_8/Chapter_6
Boley is why when I read the Little House Books, I was most fascinated by George "Doc" Tann. The Ingalls' nearest neighbor on the Osage Dimished Reserve, he lived across the creek. He treated the Osage, Cherokee, and Black and white settlers. He also delivered Baby Carrie.
In the books, Doc Tann is presented as a kind of savior who floats into the Ingalls story and out. His gravestone, which reads "A Negro Doctor That Doctored the Ingalls," reinforces this impression. https://pioneergirlproject.org/2019/02/26/george-a-tann-and-black-history-in-the-west/
But Doc was a beloved feature of the region, the founder of the area's first hospital and a wealthy landowner. Laura and 'Manzo could have visited him on their trek to Missouri in 1894--which mimicked my great-grandparents own journey from Louisiana to a better life in Boley
The Bartlesville Area History Museum kindly ( http://www.bartlesvillehistory.com ) provided me with a photo of Tann, as well as the rich "A Doctor Fetched by the Family Dog" by Eileen Charbo. It contains the 1870 census showing the Ingalls and Tanns, which I have just fetched from Ancestry.
"A Doctor Fetched by the Family Dog" is where I learned that, had Pa purchased the Kansas Territory homestead when it became available instead of leaving in a huff, he, like Doc Tann and the Osage landowners Wilder derides, would have become wealthy from oil money.
Here are two FABULOUS pieces if you want to get lost in the Ingalls in Kansas Territory. (These open into PDFs) .The first is "Little Squatter on the Osage Diminished Reserve" by Frances W. Kaye, which theorizes the "War cries" were Osage women mourning: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1022&context=greatplainsquarterly
The second is "Kansas Settlers on the Osage Diminished Reserve" by Penny T. Linsenmayer, which explains that Pa was probably squatting because he was betting that he wouldn't have to pay for Osage land if he waited long enough: https://www.kshs.org/publicat/history/2001autumn_linsenmayer.pdfE
None of the pieces answer a question: was Doc Tann squatting, or did he pay rent to the Osage, like many homesteaders? Or did he get a pass as a doctor? All we know is he purchased land in Oklahoma and Kansas, eventually opened a hospital, and treated everybody. Here's his house.
For a story on BLACK settlers and the Osage, the children's book "Wagon Wheels" features a documented incident in which Osage neighbors dropped off food for the black homesteaders of Nicodemus, Kansas, who were starving during a long winter. https://www.amazon.com/Wagon-Wheels-Level-Grade-Read/dp/0064440524
I was interested in black soldiers' role in the Ingalls story because of "Empire of the Summer Moona," the story of Comanche leader Quanah Parker. The book glances over it, but the troops who served under chief antagonist Ranald S. MacKenzie were the 41st https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24th_Infantry_Regiment_(United_States)
It seemed strange to me that the Ingalls would have spent so much time in Kansas and Dakota Territory and never encountered a black person outside of Pa's minstrelry. (That blackface show did happen, just not with Pa in it, and certainly not in some extended facial-hair episode.)
However, I was STILL a bit taken aback to learn that the 25th colored regiment was garrisoned in THREE FORTS in Dakota Territory to guard the settlers starting in 1880, which included, of course, the Ingalls. Anyone can buy me this print, by the way: https://www.lotsearch.net/lot/25th-infantry-company-a-grabill-oversize-photograph-sturgis-dakota-51063587
For a truly, truly technical work black regiments in Nebraska Territory, you can look at "Buffalo Soldiers, Braves, and the Brass", by Frank N. Schubert. This is a strictly for the MILITARY BUFFS among you: https://www.amazon.com/Buffalo-Soldiers-Braves-Brass-Robinson/dp/B004DRDCZQ
I am also indebted, of course, to the immense "Prairie Fires", by @carolinefraser, which details Wilder and Lane's crafting of a pioneer narrative that bore no resistance to reality, as well as Pamela Smith Hill's excellent annotations in "Pioneer Girl"
You have probably noticed by now that I am interested in the vastly unexplored and immensely complex relationship between black settlers, soldiers, freedmen, and the original landowners of our nation. Happy to start our book group here: http://williamlkatz.com/books/blackindians/
Feel free to hit this thread with your best jstor
A sneak preview: @lindasuepark @rgay and louise erdrich https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/roxane-gay-and-others-on-racist-little-house-depictions-ay7w/16450/
