Person

Alvin Aaron Coffey

A historical portrait of a man. — Alvin Aaron Coffey Sr.
Image/Public Domain

California was a place of both hope and danger for enslaved African Americans. The state’s antislavery laws and plentiful business opportunities provided chances for a fresh start. These business opportunities, however, also attracted dishonest men looking to earn a quick buck. As we shall see, Alvin Coffey experienced both extremes during his three journeys across the California Trail.

Alvin Aaron Coffey began his life in Mason County, Kentucky, on 14 July 1822. He was born enslaved. At the age of twelve, his enslaver Margaret Cooke sold him to Henry H. Duvall, who took him to Missouri. In 1846, Duvall sold Coffey to a doctor by the name of William Bassett. Lured by the promise of gold, Bassett took Coffey with him to California, forcing the twenty-seven-year-old to leave behind his pregnant wife, Mahala, and their two children.

The wagon train for his first overland trip left St. Joseph on 2 May 1849. Along the way, Coffey performed several essential duties, such as managing the oxen, tending to livestock, and driving the wagons. Coffey was especially skilled with oxen. Coffey often chastised other drivers that did not know how to handle their oxen, especially for overworking them; he prided himself on knowing “about how much an ox could stand.” Coffey also shared duties as a night guard, watching over the camp and its livestock in six-hour shifts. Jeanette Molson, Coffey’s descendant, concludes that her ancestor’s shared night-watch duties suggest “to some degree” that “he was treated pretty much as an equal.”

Before leaving Missouri, Coffey arranged to buy his freedom from Dr. Bassett with money earned from prospecting; Coffey was perhaps unaware that California’s constitution prohibited slavery. After arriving at the mines in the fall of 1849, Bassett revealed that he had other plans—he hired Coffey out to others and kept the money that Coffey earned as a cobbler, laundryman, and miner. Coffey wrote in his memoir that he might have been able to escape from Bassett in California, but he was afraid that—if he failed—he would end up on the auction block in New Orleans. Bassett took Coffey back to Missouri in 1853 and sold him to Mary Tindell for $1,000, thus setting in motion Coffey’s second journey to California in 1854.

Tindell’s son Nelson handled most of the transactions concerning Coffey; Tindell’s other son, Ben, who had himself just returned from California, convinced Nelson to let Coffey work in the gold mines to earn his freedom. Nelson was at first reluctant, but Coffey reasoned with him and agreed to a manumission fee of $1,000. Coffey then headed west with Ben Tindell, earning extra money along the way by hiring himself out for a variety of jobs. He was in California from 1854 to 1857, working for his new owner and himself at the Shasta and Sutter mines. There he made enough to buy freedom for himself, his wife, and his children. Unlike Bassett, Tindell held up his end of the bargain and Coffey became a free man.

Alvin Aaron Coffey made his third, and final, overland trip as a free man. With his manumission papers in hand, he returned to Missouri for his “pretty Mahala” and their children. It took two months and the help of an attorney to make sure that his wife, their two daughters, and three sons had been legally manumitted. Alvin, Mahala, and their three sons—John, Alvin Jr., and Stephen Coffey—left Missouri in April 1857 and set out for Shasta County, California. (Alvin left his two daughters with their grandmother in Ontario, Canada.) The year after they arrived, Coffey founded a school for African American and Indigenous children. Shortly thereafter, the family relocated to Red Bluff, in Tehama County, California. Coffey retrieved his daughters from Canada via the Isthmus of Panama in 1860 and brought them home to Red Bluff, where they prospered as farmers, turkey ranchers, and laundry operators.

In 1887, the Society of California Pioneers inducted Coffey, the only African American to earn this particular honor. He died on 28 October 1902 in Beulah, Alameda County, California, at the Beulah Home for Aged and Infirmed Colored People—yet another institution he had helped establish. Alvin Coffey’s story is one example of how, at the far western end of the California Trail, enslaved African American emigrants found ways to negotiate their freedom in the antebellum American West.

(Special thanks to UNM PhD candidate Angela Reiniche for compiling this information.)

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