Article

Chapter 2: The Jumping-Off Places - Getting to the Jumping-Off Places

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

Introduction/Table of Contents

Chapter 2 Sections

Thousands of hopeful travelers, black and white, poured into towns and outposts along the Missouri River during the mid-nineteenth century to prepare to “jump off” onto the overland trails. From these places, travelers would cross the Missouri River and begin their long overland trek. Historian Merrill J. Mattes defined the jumping-off places as the “Missouri River border towns” which served as trailheads for the “feeder lines” that converged onto the Great Platte River Road. (see Appendix, Chapter 2, Map 1). They were the spots where people outfitted for the overland trip before “jumping off” into the lawless (at least initially) “Indian Territory” west of the Missouri River.⁹⁶ However, for many the overland journey began long before they got to the jumping-off places or set foot on the Oregon, California, or Mormon trails. Like their white counterparts, African Americans, free and enslaved, traveled from the East, the deep South, and the Midwest to get to the jumping-off towns.

In January 1847, a group of enslaved black overlanders began making their way to the West as part of the Mormon exodus to Utah. The four men, Oscar Crosby, 32, Hark Lay 22, Henry Brown, age unknown, and an unnamed man owned by Mississippi Mormon John H. Bankhead, were part of an advance team for a brigade of Mormons known as the “Mississippi Saints” who were leaving the South for Utah. ⁹⁷ The advance team left Mississippi on January 10, 1847. The initial party of two wagons included the “four colored servants” and David Powell (brother of Mormon pioneer John Powell), Daniel M. Thomas and family (who brought their two slaves, Phileman and Tennessee), and Charles Crimson. John Brown, a white Mormon convert, was directed by Brigham Young to shepherd the group to Winter Quarters, Nebraska, where they would rendezvous with other Mormons awaiting departure to the West. ⁹⁸

The thousand-mile journey to the Mormon trailhead in Nebraska took them across Mississippi and through Tennessee, Kentucky, and Missouri. The trip took a heavy toll on the entire party, as severe storms, freezing temperatures, and exhaustion plagued the emigrants. John Brown wrote in his journal, “As we traveled northward the weather became extremely cold. At St. Louis, where we were joined by Joseph Stratton and his family, we purchased more teams and wagons. A few days later Bryant Nowlin and Matthew Ivory overtook us, and we now had six wagons. But the mud was so heavy that we had to lay over several days.” Brown added that the temperature turned bitterly cold, “giving us the severest kind of weather, which was extremely hard on the Negroes.” He declared that “this journey from Mississippi was the hardest and severest trip I had ever undertaken.” However, he also noted that “the negroes suffered most.”⁹⁹

John Brown’s journal does not indicate why the African Americans in the party were hardest hit by the inclement conditions. Certainly, everyone, regardless of race, engaged in the hard work needed to accomplish the journey and felt the effects of the harsh conditions. However, slaves, whether they labored on southern plantations or on their journey across the plains, typically shouldered the most taxing and dangerous duties. Nearly everyone, regardless of race, walked, but unlike white travelers, slaves rarely were permitted to ride in the wagons. While trudging endless miles on foot, slaves also were required by their owners to carry additional supplies.¹⁰⁰ Slaves routinely cleared trails, rescued animals from icy rivers, rounded up stray livestock, and extracted wagons and animals that had become mired in the mud. Whites performed these tasks too, but slaves were on call 24 hours a day and were forced to do their masters’ bidding under all conditions, without any choice in the matter. They often worked without sufficient food, water, clothing, shelter, or rest. There is nothing to suggest that the experiences of the “four colored servants” in the Mormon party, who seemed to have had nothing to protect them from the cold, were any different.

Slaves in the antebellum South were particularly susceptible to pneumonia, influenza, and other respiratory ailments. Historian Eugene Genovese notes that pneumonia was a “steady slave killer” after 1845 throughout the South. Genovese states that by 1850, “planters more or less assumed that their slaves would be troubled regularly by pneumonia and related diseases.” ¹⁰¹ Winter and spring months were the worst time for slaves who were “much exposed to the inclemencies of the weather.”¹⁰² It is not surprising, therefore, that two of the six slaves who embarked on the mid-winter overland trip from Mississippi to Nebraska succumbed to lobar pneumonia, an illness known in the antebellum period as “winter fever.” Brown recorded in his journal that his slave Henry Brown “took cold and finally the winter fever set in which caused his death on the road.” John Brown buried Henry Brown in Andrew County “at the lower end of the round Prairie, eight miles north of Savannah, Missouri.” By the time the party reached Council Bluffs, the black man owned by John H. Bankhead likewise had died of winter fever. Brown does not mention the location of the nameless slave’s burial place.¹⁰³

Next Section - Chapter 2, The Jumping-Off Places, First Impressions

96 Mattes, The Great Platte River Road, 103.

97 Coleman, “A History of Blacks in Utah, 1825-1910,” 30-33; Parrish, “The Mississippi Saints,” 490-499; Beller, “Negro Slaves in Utah,” 122-124; Lythgoe, “Negro Slavery in Utah,” 40-42. See also Miriam B. Murphy, “Those Pioneering African Americans,” in Utah History to Go, http://historytogo.utah.gov/utah_chapters/pioneers_and_cowboys/thosepioneeringafricanamericans [accessed March 24, 2011].

98 Coleman, “A History of Blacks in Utah, 1825-1910,” 32-33; Parrish, “The Mississippi Saints,” 493-498; Lythgoe, “Negro Slavery in Utah,” 40-43; Beller, “Negro Slaves in Utah,” 122; John Brown, Autobiography of Pioneer John Brown, 1820-1896, ed. John Zimmerman Brown (Salt Lake City: Stevens and Walls, Inc., 1941), 72.

99 Brown, Autobiography of Pioneer John Brown, 72. See also Kate B. Carter, The Story of the Negro Pioneer (Salt Lake City: Daughters of Utah Pioneers, 1965), 7-8; Parrish, “The Mississippi Saints,” 499; Beller, “Negro Slaves in Utah,” 123; Lythgoe, “Negro Slavery in Utah,” 43-44.

100 For an 1849 account of an overland slave carrying additional supplies at the behest of her owners, see the journal of Joseph Alonzo Stuart, “Notes on a trip to California,” 14-16, WA MSS S-619, Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Library, Yale University. Also described in Lapp, Blacks in Gold Rush California, 30.

101 For a discussion of slave health and susceptibility to diseases, see Eugene D. Genovese, “The Medical and Insurance Costs of Slaveholding in the Cotton Belt,” The Journal of Negro History 45, no. 3 (July 1960): 141-155, especially 150-151 for the quotes.

102 This statement is from the Medical Society of the State of North Carolina, Transactions at the Third Annual Meeting, May, 1852, 77, as quoted in Genovese, “The Medical and Insurance Costs of Slaveholding,” 150.

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.