was by a sense of “how could I not” that I entered eastern Colorado’s plains in search of this winding tributary of the Arkansas River.
State Highway 96 and the Missouri Pacific Railroad tracks cross Big Sandy Creek just east of the ruined town of Chivington. No cars, no person passed in the hours I walked along the bank, through high grass and over barbed wire, as the stream bent through shallows and riffles across the plains. Killdeer and red-winged blackbirds were my only vocal companions besides cottonwood leaves shuddering in a constant June-dry wind. A century and a half before, a breeze lifted a U.S. flag by Black Kettle’s lodge. Villagers waved white flags at the approaching troops.
That no roadside marker acknowledged the violence didn’t surprise me. The land hadn’t yet opened to the public as a historic site under the National Park Service. Nothing appeared on my road map or atlas-gazetteer. The slaughter wasn’t mentioned in my schoolbooks. Neither was the muddied water sweeping earth to the horizon, nor the shadows I tried to follow.
WHILE THUMBING AN issue of Colorado Heritage magazine at a rest stop, I chanced across possible treasure. One O. E. Aultman had opened a photographic studio in Trinidad, Colorado, in 1889. Among nearly five thousand surviving images were stunning portraits of African Americans and people of obviously mixed heritage. Surely Trinidad, founded where the Santa Fe Trail’s northern route and Purgatoire River converged, was also a place where many peoples had converged. I had no idea if any of my ancestors had passed this way, but I’d learn what I could.
Both the director of the Trinidad History Museum and a volunteer at the A. R. Mitchell Museum of Western Art were gracious and apologetic.
Little information is left on African Americans in this area—of course, they don’t live here now . . .
Subject information for the Aultman photos is almost non-existent, the titles of many images are just Unidentified____.
Unidentified, unidentifiable. Like isolated grains of sand, these photographs teased absent stories. The town had just begun its big festival to celebrate the opening of the Santa Fe Trail. People crowded the streets. No one looked like me.
. . . of course, they don’t live here now.
I left Trinidad, returning east, downstream to the Arkansas.
MANY RIVERS BECOME one in Oklahoma. The Cimarron, forks of the Canadian, and Salt Fork vein eastward across the state to join the Arkansas before it meanders between Ouachita and Ozark uplands. I drove in with an evening thunderstorm, crossing the hundredth meridian between the Cimarron River and Canadian North Fork. Rolling plains greened almost secretly.
I couldn’t remember being in Oklahoma before; maybe familial memory remained. My mother’s cousin had told me years before that kin might have come here, that they were Black Cherokee or Creek. Whether she was right or wrong, I knew only some surnames: Turner, Reeves, Cade, and Allen.
A road sign declared YOU ARE ENTERING I.T.
Enslaved African Americans once lived in “Indian Territory.” They’d been brought by members of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole nations forced across the Mississippi River in the southeastern removals of the 1830s and 1840s. Although only an elite few of the “five civilized tribes” held human beings as property, more than seven thousand people with African blood lived in bondage in Indian Territory on the eve of the Civil War. But bondage took different forms, from the rigid “slave codes” of the Cherokee Nation to more fluid social relations in Seminole society.
Autonomous communities of Seminole “slaves” formed the earliest Black towns here. Freed people established more settlements after the war. Then came the 1889 and 1890s land runs. Thousands of African American homesteaders were among those who settled “unassigned” or “surplus” lands—what hadn’t been reserved for other removed tribal peoples including Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, and Apache. Many settlers came from the Deep South searching for what one Black territorial newspaper called “the last chance for a free home.” By 1910 at least thirty all-Black towns had formed in what was now the new state of Oklahoma, most striving to become independent, farm-supported communities. Those now abandoned—like North Fork Colored, Cimarron City, Liberty, or Wybark—rival in number those surviving—like Summit, Tullahassee, Boley, and Langston City.
I had no idea where my mother’s family fit in, if at all.
ROLLING AND GULLIED red plains lie south of the Cimarron River in north-central Oklahoma. Langston City began there in 1890 on unassigned lands opened in the 1889 run. Its population once exceeded three thousand—before the state highway was rerouted.
I spent a day gathering what information I could in the Black Heritage Center archives of Langston University, formerly the Colored Agricultural and Normal University of Oklahoma. Through the 1890s and early 1900s, Langston City’s founder, Edwin P. McCabe, and other leaders promoted a “Negro” Oklahoma. They advertised existing towns and recruited immigrants for new town colonies and homesteads. “Langston City restores to the Negro his right and privileges as an American citizen and offers protection to themselves, families, and home,” wrote McCabe, also editor of The Langston City Herald. “Langston City is the Negro’s refuge from lynching, burning at the stake and other lawlessness and turns the Negro’s sorrow into happiness.”
The hope that Oklahoma might be admitted to the Union as an African American–controlled state was far from fancy for thousands of Black homesteaders. But the promise of self-governing havens would be dashed. Owners of small farms had little margin against drought or repeated crop failures. Few could afford the turn to mechanized farming. And when Indian and Oklahoma territories became the state of Oklahoma in 1907, the legislature disenfranchised African American residents and segregated public facilities.
OKFUSKEE COUNTY. ALTHOUGH it appeared that I-40 had sucked the life from Highway 62 in rural east-central Oklahoma, the road sign was enough to draw me in:
WELCOME TO BOLEY
LARGEST AFRICAN AMERICAN TOWN
FOUNDED 1903
BOLEY RODEO MEMORIAL WEEKEND
The historical marker clinched it: BOLEY, CREEK NATION, I.T., ESTABLISHED AS AN ALL BLACK TOWN ON LAND OF CREEK INDIAN FREEDWOMAN ABIGAIL BARNETT . . .
The wide main street was empty of cars, the stone-and-brick buildings lining it more boarded up than not. I almost didn’t stop. But at Boley’s Community Center I met Mrs. M. Joan Matthews, mayor, and her sister Mrs. Henrietta Hicks. They gave me a tour of the town “museum,” an old house opened on request.
From these generous women and other residents, I learned that Boley began as a rural community of Creek freed people following the Civil War. Formally established as a town after the turn of the twentieth century, it quickly became “a going concern,” with more than four thousand residents.
Like The Langston City Herald, The Boley Progress found its way throughout the South, promoting the town as a refuge. “Have you experienced freedom?” began one early article. “What are you waiting for? If we do not look out for our own welfare, who is going to do it for us? Are you always going to depend upon the white race to control your affairs for you?” ran another.
By 1912 Boley boasted two banks, five grocery stores, five hotels, seven restaurants, three or four cotton gins, three drugstores, one jewelry store, four department stores, two livery stables, two insurance agencies, two photographic
