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Black Pioneers: Images of the Black Experience on the North American Frontier

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Today, most people (even most African-Americans) are totally unaware of the long and rich heritage of blacks in the West in the nineteenth century. For the most part, the way we perceive them is still influenced by the time-honored and completely erroneous view that they more or less never strayed from their jobs as cooks and barbers, washer-women and baggage porters. Some of us are aware that there were two black cavalry regiments that fought in the Indian Wars (9th and 10th cavalry, the "Buffalo Soldiers"). But the belief persists that most of the West's other blacks lived in a world all their own and interacted with whites and others only in the context of racial violence or social subservience.

John W. Ravage radically reverses this image in "Black Pioneers". By incorporating a phenomenally rich collection of photographs into his text, he visually documents the fact that African-Americans were not by any means confined to the peripheries of society. On the contrary, they engaged in a multitude of roles which ranged from the menial jobs stereotypically ascribed to them to the ownership of prosperous farms and ranches. They worked right alongside whites and seldom encountered the kind of incessant racial conflict long believed to have existed. Additionally, they made many unique, significant contributions to western society and played a number of key roles. For instance, mountain man Jim Beckwourth was a mulatto who explored and opened up significant portions of the Rocky Mountain West; often portrayed as white (like John James Audubon, who was half-Haitian), he was once played by a white actor in a movie. We also read about figures like James Douglas, the first colonial governor of British Columbia (sworn in in 1858), as well as groups of lesser-known blacks like whalers, policemen, loggers -- in short, men and women employed in the same kinds of work as whites.

Ravage also emphasizes the geographical diversity of the black experience in the West. He devotes separate chapters to the African-American presence on the Great Plains and in California, the Southwest, Washington and Oregon, western Canada, Alaska, and even Hawaii. Plus, you'll find a chapter dedicated exclusively to African-American women.

The book would hardly have been possible without the documentation afforded by the photographs, since they are Ravage's primary source of information. They show us a world neglected by many and deliberately ignored by others, but that most of us (like myself) simply have had no clue existed. They help give a "new" face to the West, a face that in fact was always there.

Pictures are worth a thousand words as they say. It is certainly true in Mr. Ravage's book. I like the book a lot. The issues I had with the book are very minor. First the book goes a little off course when the subject matter leaves the US mainland, though the information presented was very useful. I guess a title of a book should stick to what it professes.

There was one excerpt that bothered me regarding US government using the Buffalo Soldiers to subdue the native groups.

"In the Civil War, over 175,000 African Americans men fought in the Union army in the Negro Volunteer Corps. When the conflict was over, black troopers were assigned to the western frontier, where they had problems with Mexicans and engaged in the Indian Wars for approximately forty years. There were more than 10,000 who fought in the infantry and cavalry, all in segregated units under the command of white officers.

Based in the Plains and the Southwest, these enlisted men fought the Sioux, Apache, Comanche, Cheyenne and other Indian "belligerents"; protected the Southern border with Mexico and guarded pioneer wagon trains. "

The term Indian belligerents bugged me. If someone was stealing your land and slaughtering your people, I would think making a big fuss over it is in order.

With the end of the American Civil War, the nation's west and the southwest saw an immense migration of former slaves seeking economic prosperity and an escape from the continuing hostility and repression by the white southern populace. To this day it still surprises many that roughly one-third of all 19th century 'cowboys' were black men. Now in an updated and expanded second edition, "Black Pioneers: Images Of The Black Experience On The North American Frontier" by John W. Ravage (Professor Emeritus of Mass Media, University of Wyoming" is a seminal work of meticulous scholarship in which such disparate elements of historical data as oral histories, period photographic images, diary and journal entries, and other written documents reflective of the black experience in the Western United States and Canada have been retrieved from personal and academic archives to present a coherent study that is as informed as it is informative. Of special note in this new addition is the inclusion of sections on black entertainers and ranchers, a chapter on the dating of historic photographs and their genealogical significance, as well as an expanded bibliography related to the black frontier experience. Profusely illustrated throughout, "Black Pioneers" is a welcome and strongly recommended addition to personal, academic, and community library Black History Studies and 20th Century American Western History Studies reference collections and supplemental reading lists.