Great Plains by Ian Frazier

Great Plains by Ian Frazier

Author:Ian Frazier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux


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NICODEMUS, Kansas, is a town with a population of about fifty in the western part of the state. Like many other towns on the Great Plains, Nicodemus was founded in the 1870s; unlike any other that still survives, it was founded by black homesteaders. In 1877, a small group of emigrants from Kentucky and Tennessee, including the families of Randall Smith, Lewis and Henry Williams, Sam Garland, Manuel Napew, and a Baptist minister named Silas Lee, arrived in Graham County, filed homestead claims, and laid out a town. They began too late in the season to break sod and put in crops, and they were short on draft animals, equipment, seeds, and money. Their first winter was hard. They lived in shelters dug into hillsides. Some of the men got jobs on the Kansas Pacific Railroad thirty-five miles away. In the spring, with just three horses between them, they had to do a lot of cultivating and planting by hand. Emigrants continued to arrive, and the town grew. By 1880, it had a population of almost five hundred. By 1887, it had churches, stores, an academy, a band, and two newspapers, one called The Western Cyclone. A man from Nicodemus who became State Auditor in 1883 was the first black to hold major office in Kansas.

The people who founded Nicodemus were part of a movement of tens of thousands of blacks who left the South in the late 1870s for new homes in the West. The movement started because many recently freed slaves were poor, mistreated by whites, and disappointed that freedom was so little of an improvement. In Southern states where Democrats had returned to power, blacks had just lost the vote. Some white Southerners opposed to Reconstruction were not convinced it should be a serious offense to shoot blacks; several of the West’s famous white outlaws got their start that way. Benjamin “Pap” Singleton, a black carpenter from Nashville who helped so many to emigrate that he was sometimes called the Moses of the Colored Exodus, compared the white Southerners to “a muddy-faced bellowing bull.” Singleton could not read or write, but he travelled all over distributing circulars (which the railroads and Western land companies were printing in volume at the time) about the halcyon new lands on the Great Plains. His Tennessee Real Estate and Homestead Association was one of several “colonization councils” which attracted members by the thousands. He helped to found black colonies in several Kansas counties, and by the end of 1878 had sent 7,432 people to the state. Black people all over the South became excited at the thought of this new promised land. In Vicksburg, a convention of cotton planters urged them to preserve “intact until completion, contracts for labor-leasing which have already been made.”

Because of the career in Kansas of the famed abolitionist John Brown, that state was especially attractive to black emigrants. At first, Governor John St. John made a speech welcoming the new arrivals. Then, possibly because of urging from S.



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