PSU Magazine Winter 1994

Contrary to some historical accounts, Jim Beckwourth was black. personality. But at the same time Ho llywood was making Westerns– primarily in the '50s- American life was still ri fe with rac ial injustice. "Hav ing a society in which one race is defined a infe rior or undes irable and relegated to a econd -class statu is not consistent with that symbolic represen– tation of that American identity and sp irit," says Millner. So over time, blacks were left out of the exc iting stories of the American West. If soc iety wa not go ing to let black people vote in the South in the 1920s, it was not go ing to write about the stories of black heros in the We t in the 1820s. O nly in the last decade or so have blacks begun to appear in Westerns in the proportions that reflect true history. Danny G lover play a black cowboy in "Lonesome Dove." Morgan Freeman plays a black frontiersman and outlaw in "Unforgiven." If history and pop culture have been ambivalent about including blacks in the West, so too was the West it elf. When white settlers from Mi souri– a lave state-came to the O regon Territory, they wanted to set up their new lives without having to compete 10 PSU Magazine aga inst slaves, says Millner. After all , where they came from, slavery was the worst kind of competition : Why would someone pay an individual a liv ing wage when they could buy a man and work him fo r the rest of his life at a fraction of the cost ? This also was a time when the i sue of slavery was beg inning to tear apa rt the country. The white settlers wanted to avoid any kind of rac ial tension, and the best way to do that was to not have a rac ially diverse society. Early settlers pursued the dual goa l of having no slave and no race problems by passing a law in 1844 that excluded blacks from settling in the territory. "There' a certain perverted logic to it, but that' what many of them were operating under," says Millner. As a result, when blacks moved west, they turned north to Washington or outh to Cali fornia. The legacy of the times is seen in O regon today, where the black popula– tion i much smaller, proportionately, than that of Califo rnia, a state that has been racially mixed since the days of the Conquistadors. Integration in California began as the Spaniards brought African slaves to Mexico. O ver generations, the slaves, who were free for years before the American C ivil War, combined with both the Spanish and Indian cultures. California, because it was a part of Mexico, was racially diverse throughout the 1800s. Many of the founders of Los Angeles, Millner says, were black or of mixed race. It was only when Americans gained control of California that rac ial tensions escalated. Peter Burnett, the sponsor of O regon's black exclusion law, was drawn to California during the 1849 Gold Rush and became the state's first U .S. governor. He tried , unsuccessfully, to introduce a black exclusion law there. It narrowly failed; however, the state did pass a series of laws that discriminated against both blacks and Chinese. The state of Washington had a different story to tell. Formerly posse sed by the British, it didn't become a tate until 1889- 33 years after O regon. The fact that its population developed later than both O regon's and Ca lifornia's helped it become more rac ially diverse. Slavery and the C ivil War were already long past, and many of the newcomers were Scand inav ian immigrants who carried with them li ttle of the rac ial prejudices of the new O regonians. By that time, several blacks had already made names for themse lves north of the Columbia. They included George Washington Bush, a successful soldier, mountain man and Missouri farmer who, when faced with Oregon's exclusion law, settled in the Puget Sound area and opened the way for other American settler . They also included George Washington, another black pioneer from Missouri who fo unded what i now the town of Centrali a. In the West-as in the East, the relationship blacks had with caucas ians was a complicated one. But it was even more complicated with Nati ve Americans. On the one hand , the two group shared a common bond: Both were either oppressed or rev iled by the American whites. Individual blacks who broke free of white-dominated soc iety could often find acceptance among the Indians, who did not have the rigid concepts of racial differences that the whites had. "In the native culture, you didn't prove yourself by whose son or daughter you were or where you were born. You proved yourself in combat or how proficient a hunter you were or how brave y u were," says Millner. "If you could prove those criteria, you were in." It was this kind of acceptance that allowed Jim Beckwourth to become a chief in the C row Indian tribe. Millner points out that there were many accounts of white wagon train members encountering blacks or descendents of blacks among the Native Americans. Their diarie described Indians who, instead of having long traight black hair, wore what today would be called Afros. O n the other hand , blacks fought alongs ide whites in the Indian Wats.. They were nicknamed "Buffalo