Last updated: March 28, 2022
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Chapter 2: The Jumping-Off Places - First Impressions
Sweet Freedom's Plains
African Americans on the Overland Trails 1841-1869
By Shirley Ann Wilson Moore, PhD.
For the National Park Service
National Trails Regions 6, 7, & 8
Chapter 2 Sections
By the early 1840s, the Missouri River was the boundary between the settled United States and the Western frontier. Some emigrants traveled directly overland from their old homes in the East, the Upper Midwest, and the South to the Missouri River jumping-off places. Many others boarded riverboats or traveled overland to St. Louis, at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers (The sights and sounds of that busy multi-cultural city, especially shocking scenes witnessed at the slave markets, are described in numerous emigrant journals.) From St. Louis, travelers continued by steamer up the Missouri to Independence, Kansas City, and points north, where their real adventure would begin.104
Many overlanders stopped temporarily in Independence, Westport (present-day Kansas City, Missouri), St. Joseph, and Council Bluffs, bustling Missouri River towns where they could obtain the items they needed for the long trek. Most emigrants were fascinated, overwhelmed, and frequently appalled by the sky-high prices, teeming crowds, incessant cacophony, and raucous environment they encountered in these places.105
A new arrival in Missouri observed that St. Joseph contained “some two thousand five hundred inhabitants and at present is a very busy place on account of the California emigrations which seems to center here . . . [The] place contains four good sized Hotels, about twenty stores and the residue is made up of groceries, bakeries, & C.”106 Emigrants, often carrying their life savings, became prey for the thieves, gamblers, and desperadoes who swarmed the jumping-off towns. Overland diarist Lucius Fairchild decried the presence in St. Joseph of “thieves enough to steal a man blind.”107
While waiting to jump off for California in Kanesville, Iowa (near Council Bluffs), in April 1850, at least one black overlander fell victim to such thieves as he was preparing to join a California-bound company. The unnamed black man, identified only as being from Wisconsin, suffered a severe setback to his emigration plans when two white men he had hired to work for him on the journey stole his teams and outfitting gear. Edward H. N. Patterson, of Oquawka, Illinois, witnessed the incident while waiting to leave Kanesville with his wagon company. Patterson wrote in his journal that a “gentleman of color from Wisconsin came here [to Kanesville] last night to join two teams which he had fitted out, well—he found his teams and was very summarily dismissed by his hired white men, one of whom drew a pistol and ordered him to vamose.” The black man left but he “set about devising some plan by which to recover his teams.” Patterson also noted that “in the meantime, taking advantage of the night[,] the gentlemen who were ‘bound for California at the nigger’s expense’ eloped, and are now in Nebraska, where I wish them no harm—but hope the Indians may strip them; their rascality deserves no better fate.”108 There is no indication whether the black man recovered his property or was able to continue his journey west.
In addition to robberies, murders and assaults were commonplace in the towns along the Missouri River. In 1846, emigrant and future historian Francis Parkman wrote that even in relatively small Westport, “whiskey, by the way, circulates more freely . . . than is altogether safe in a place where every man carries a loaded pistol in his pocket.”109 (see Appendix, Chapter 2, Photo 1). Parkman also noted that in Independence a “multitude of shops had sprung up to furnish emigrants and Santa Fe traders with necessaries for the journey; and there was an incessant hammering and banging from a dozen blacksmiths’ sheds, where the heavy wagons were being repaired, and the horses and oxen shod. The streets were thronged with men, horses and mules.” 110 (see Appendix, Chapter 2, Photo 2). Clearly, the emigrants were the economic life-blood of the jumping-off towns, which fiercely competed with each other to attract the business of westbound travelers.111
Next Section - Chapter 2, The Jumping-Off Places, Cosmopolitan Crossroads
103 Coleman notes that when Brown’s party arrived at Winter Quarters, at least six or seven other African Americans were already there. These included Isaac and Jane Manning James and their sons, Sylvester and Silas, a free black family who had converted to Mormonism; and two slaves, Elizabeth (Lizzie) Flake and Green Flake (no relation), who were owned by James and Agnes Flake. See Coleman, “A History of Blacks in Utah, 1825-1910,” 31-35. See also Brown, Autobiography of Pioneer, 72; Parrish, “The Mississippi Saints,” 499-500; and Lythgoe, “Negro Slavery in Utah,” 43-44.
104 Mattes, The Great Platte River Road, 104.
105 For a comprehensive discussion of the jumping-off towns, see Unruh, The Plains Across, 111-117; Mattes, The Great Platte River Road, 103-135; and Bagley, So Rugged and Mountainous, 171-176.
106 Emigrant Silas Newcomb in 1850, quoted in The Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration, The Oregon Trail: The Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean (Washington, D.C.: Oregon Trails Memorial Association, 1939), 49.
107 Lucius Fairchild to J. C. Fairchild and family, May 5, 1849, quoted in Unruh, The Plains Across, 114.
108 Edward H. N. Patterson, journal entry dated Friday, April 19, 1850. Patterson’s journal entries were published in the Oquawka Spectator, Summer and Fall, 1850, in a series titled, “Overland Journal, Impressions by E. H. N. Patterson.” The entire series is located in the Oquawka Spectator microfilm holdings of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, Springfield, Illinois. See also University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois Newspaper Project, Oquawka Spectator (Henderson County), oclc no. 11347317, 1848-1908, Record Set Name: Henderson County Quill, Notes: filed under Stronghurst.
109 Francis Parkman, The Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky Mountain Life, 6th ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1877), 8.
110 Ibid., 6.
111 See, for example, Walker D. Wyman, “The Outfitting Posts,” Pacific Historical Review 18, no. 1 (February 1949): 14-23, especially 16-23; “Circular to California Emigrants,” in The Daily Missouri Republican, March 27, 1850; “Independence, California Outfits, &c.,” a letter signed by “Justice,” in The Daily Missouri Republican, n.d., courtesy of Bill and Annette Curtis, Independence, Missouri.