AFRICAN AMERICAN BUSINESSES: ARIZONA TERRITORY

These individuals who were the owners and operators of small businesses were the exceptions and not the rule: but their success helped illustrate the fact that Negroes could come to Arizona and establish themselves, despite the hardships of living in a frontier environment, and in spite of the feelings of prejudice and discrimination generated by those around them. The majority who come, however, were not so lucky. Most Negroes came to Arizona with no skills and were forced by....circumstances to seek employment at the bottom of the economic ladder. It is true that there were many white settlers who were likewise unskilled, but it seems that potential employers were generally more eager to hire [them]. But, for the most part, Negroes showed themselves to have been equipped to adapt to the frontier environment....

Thompson, daughter of Stewart Calvin (Tony) and Mary Logan Thompson, was born August 10, 1905, in Des Moines, Iowa, and was nine when the family moved to North Dakota in 1914... Like other immigrants to Dakota, the Thompson family had been drawn by the promise of a better life. Era Bell's brother Hobart had come to North Dakota in 1913 to work for his uncle, James A. Garrison, who had homesteaded near Driscoll. Hobart also worked for Robert Johnson, a black farmer who lived near Steele... Stewart and Mary Thompson had come to North Dakota at the urging of Garrison, Stewart's half-brother, to escape the problems of the city, problems which included limited job opportunities for their sons.

Garrison, with his Irish wife Ada and their two children, had homesteaded, receiving a patent on 160 acres near Driscoll on September 30, 1907. Tony Thompson and Garrison's mother, Mina Garrison, who was born into slavery January 19, 1821, and had come to North Dakota in 1909 to live with her son, James, died there May 21, 1911... [Garrison] wrote glowingly of the boundless prairie, the new land of plenty where a man's fortune was measured by the number of his sons, and a farm could be had even without money...

Era Bell Thompson's reactions to North Dakota were different from those of the rest of the family. She was excited about seeing Indians and about riding ponies. Her mother looked from the train window to the bleak, treeless, snowcovered land which was not at all like her native Virginia... Thompson's first reactions were to the beauty of North Dakota:

Edward Hatch, a...native of Maine, had gone early to sea and then engaged in the lumber business in Pennsylvania. In 1855 he moved to Iowa and was residing there when the war came. He received appointment as a captain in the Second Iowa Cavalry in August, 1861, and in less than a year was its colonel. He took part in Grierson's famous raid of 1863, received citations for gallantry and meritorious service at the battles of Franklin and Nashville, and closed out the war as brevet major general of volunteers. Able, decisive, ambitious, and personable, he received Grant's unqualified endorsement to lead the Ninth Cavalry.

Benjamin Grierson was a most unlikely candidate for a distinguished career as a cavalryman. Since the age of eight, when a pony kicked him in the face and left a cheek scarred permanently, he had been skittish of horses. A small-town music teacher and an ardent admirer of Abraham Lincoln, he volunteered immediately when the war came and sought a commission in the infantry. But fate decreed otherwise and when his appointment came through, he found himself a major in the Sixth Illinois Cavalry. Despite an almost complete lack of military experience and his dislike of horses, Grierson was soon promoted to colonel and was selected by General Grant in April, 1863 to lead three regiments of cavalry in a diversionary raid through Mississippi.

Grierson's six-hundred-mile, sixteen-day raid through the Confederate heartland contributed materially to Grants successful operations around Vicksburg, let the latter to describe the raid as the most brilliant expedition of the war, and made the easygoing, tolerant Grierson a national figure. By the time of Appomattox he was a brevet major general of volunteers and had the confidence of both Grant and Sherman. Mustered out of the service in April, 1866, he gave brief thought to a business career and then accepted the proffered command of the Tenth Cavalry.

Hatch and Grierson wasted no time in...organizing their regiments. The former established headquarters at Greenville, Louisiana, and the latter at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. From the first, however, difficulty was encountered in procuring experienced officers, for many of them refused to serve with Negro troops. More than a few agreed with Brevet Major General Eugene A. Carr that Negroes simply would not make good soldiers, and took a lower rank in order to serve with a white regiment. The dashing "boy general," George A. Custer, refused a lieutenant colonelcy with the Ninth and wrangled the same rank in the newly formed Seventh Cavalry--a decision that was probably a stroke of good fortune for the Ninth and launched Custer on the road to the Little Big Horn and a dubious niche in history ten years later...
Source: William H. Leckie, The Buffalo Soldiers: A Narrative of the Negro Cavalry in the West (Norman, 1967), pp. 7-8.

FIRST RECRUITS, NINTH CAVALRY, 1866
The initial difficulties of recruiting a regiment of soldiers from a recently enslaved population are profiled in the vignette below. This account describes the first soldiers who joined the Ninth Cavalry in Louisiana and the only mutiny to occur in the regiment, an uprising in San Antonio in 1867.
Army recruiters, with great haste and little judgment, concentrated their efforts in New Orleans and vicinity and had little difficulty in enlisting the necessary numbers, for in most instances they seemed to have winked at physical qualifications. Many young Negroes were eager to enlist because the army afforded an opportunity for social and economic betterment difficult to achieve in a society all but closed to them. Thirteen dollars a month was meager pay, but it was more than most could expect to earn as civilians, and when food, clothing, and shelter were added, a better life seem assured.

For whatever reason they enlisted in droves. Nor were all of them from Louisiana. Kentucky contributed, among others, farmer George Gray, doomed to die of tetanus in the post hospital at Fort Clark, Texas, and laborer William Sharpe, with an Indian arrow awaiting him on the rocky banks of the Pecos River. Little Emanuel Stance, nineteen years old and scarcely five fee tall, was a native of Charleston, South Carolina, with a Medal of Honor in his future. From Virginia came Washington Wyatt who would die at the hands of persons unknown in Austin, Texas, before he reached his twenty-first birthday. And so they came, farmers, teamsters, dyers, cooks, bakers, painters, waiters and cigar makers, to enlist for five years in the Ninth Regiment of Cavalry, USA.

But they came too quickly and officers were far too few to train, discipline, and educate so many green recruits or vent to keep them busy at routine tasks. The men were nearly all illiterate and filled with superstition. The wildest rumor found ready ears and provoked constant unrest, while the enforced idleness led to gambling, drinking, quarreling, and fighting. [Prostitutes] swarmed about the camp along with other undesirables. The cotton compresses in which they were quartered became overcrowded and along with rations, poorly cooked over open fires, led to illness and disease. Cholera struck in October and November, killing twenty-three men and spreading fear among the rest. Desertions became frequent and morale slid toward the vanishing point.

Despite the difficulties and shaky discipline, Hatch managed to organize all twelve companies of the regiment by February 1867, though only eleven officers had reported for duty at that time. Rumors of impending service on the frontier were circulating among the men, and officers noted that some of their neophyte troopers were becoming surly and unruly. Rumor became fact in March when Hatch received orders to transfer the regiment to Texas. Two companies, L and M, were to take station at Brownsville on the Rio Grande while the remaining ten companies were to encamp near San Antonio and undergo further training.

Marching orders had come much too soon. Hatch had little more than an ill-disciplined mob on his hands and the stage was set for violence and tragedy. En route to San Antonio mutiny flared in K company and was suppressed only with great difficulty. When the city was reached...friction developed quickly between troopers and citizens. Clashes with police became an almost daily occurrence. Serious trouble was only a matter of time, and it came on April 9 as too few officers trove to control their men. Mutiny broke out in A, E., and K companies, and before order was restored Lieutenant Fred Smith of K was forced to shoot two of his troopers.

Hatch placed the blame for the tragic affair on a shortage of officers, and Captain W.S. Abert, Sixth Cavalry, assigned to investigate the mutiny, sustained him, but added that many of the men were "too light, too you and have weak constitutions." He might have added that among the villains in the piece were careless or indifferent recruiters who had enlisted far too may many who were unfit for military service...

Those first regulars to return in 1867 might have caused a stir had there been anyone to witness their arrival. They were Negroes... Between 1867 and 1885 all the regular colored units were stationed at Fort Davis at one time or another. From the post's records a picture of the Negro in combat against the Indian emerges, a picture that enlarged a number of times includes the history of the colored regiments and their accomplishments from the Mexican border to Dakota Territory.

The first Negro regiments to arrive at the ruins of Fort Davis were six companies (troops) of the Ninth Cavalry under command of the regiment's lieutenant colonel, Wesley Merritt... The troopers soon found that the days of the Trans-Pecos were long, hot, and dry. Their arduous labor at construction of barracks and stables was broken occasionally by long patrols and futile chases. While these trips were welcomed for the change of pace they offered, the men of the Ninth learned the frustrations of Indian fighting. By the time the soldiers learned of the latest raid and made ready for the chase, the wily Comanches or Apaches usually had made good their escape. Usually, too, the Indians kept clear of the routine patrols, preferring a slash at some undefended wagon train. The boredom felt by the troops was broken rarely by direct contact with the enemy...

One of the most important contributions of the Negro infantry at Fort Davis was road building, a duty they thoroughly detested. In the twisting canyons that led to the fort, they constructed rock-walled roadbeds that still stand, now weed-covered monuments that testify to back-breaking labor and a high proficiency. but picks and shovels were a long way from the alluring stories of the recruiting sergeant. The regimental history of the Twenty-fifth Infantry summed up it Texas years as "a continuous series of building and repairing of military posts, roads and telegraph lines; of escort and guard duty of all descriptions; of marchings and counter-marchings from post to post, and of scouting for Indians which resulted in a few unimportant skirmishes...

The forts themselves were not much to look at, especially in the 1870s. Despite popular conceptions they were rarely stockaded and Indians never attacked them. Most enlisted barracks were often mere hovels in the early post-war years. Congress resisted authorizing construction funds for forts that seemed to be closing down every few years as Indian warfare shifted from one area to another. The post surgeon walked through the barracks at Fort Davis, which was better than most forts, one night at ten o'clock and found the squad rooms almost suffocating due to the crowded conditions... The food remained very much the same throughout the Indian wars: beef and bacon, potatoes, beans, fresh vegetables from the post garden, bread, and sometimes fruit or jam made up a typical ration. The post surgeon at Fort Davis noted that "colored troops consume much more of their ration than white troops."...

The reputation that the Negro soldier earned at Fort Davis and throughout the West would outlast the trying time. Today, Fort Davis is National Historic Site. Its structures and its museum tell the larger story of its history of regiments of both colors. But in the colorful exhibits and in the mute barracks, the memory of the Negro soldier emerges--a Remington print, brass insignia of the Twenty-fourth Infantry, a clear bugle call echoing from the cliffs, and, always, the legacy.

Because it was void of timber, had only scattered water holes, lacked adequate landmarks, and presented an almost limitless "ocean" of waving grass, white men tended to stay clear...and even Indians frequented the Staked Plains only to hunt buffalo or to cross it... But it was [Colonel] William R. Shafter who, with his black troops, provided most of the reliable knowledge of the dreaded and barren Llano Estacado and led the final assault against hostile Indians there...

The immediate result of the scout proved revealing. Shafter and his black troops discovered and destroyed an abandoned Indian village... They captured about twenty horses and mules and [an Indian woman] who informed them that the Comanches...Lipan and Mescalero Apaches, long time enemies, had concluded a peace. Lead, they found at the Indian camp, stamped with the trademark of a St. Louis, Missouri firm, provided important evidence that the Sand Hills was a place of barter for the Comancheros. Of far more significance [was] the penetration into the Sand Hills where it was generally believe that soldiers could not operate. The expedition not only destroyed another Indian sanctuary, but it brought back geographical knowledge necessary for future operations.

[1875] As the finale to the Red River War Shafter with his black troops was to scout the Staked Plains... The resulting expedition was the most thorough exploration of that region to that time. For six months, June to December, the Negro soldiers of his command criss-crossed the Llano Estacado over a maze of trails, covering more than 2,500 miles... On August 7, near present Lorenzo, Shafter with his men overtook nine Comancheros, mounted, armed and with several pack mules. Although the traders would say nothing as to the whereabouts of Indians, Shafter took them into his service as guides. From here he continued south...on the Yellowhouse stream within the present city of Lubbock...heading into a region absolutely unknown to Anglo and Negro Americans... Unquestionably this was a remarkable scout., The command...fulfilled its orders to sweep the Plains of Indians... The magnificent horse-and-buffalo days of the proud Southern Plains Indians were gone forever... Indeed, the next year, 1876, Charles Goodnight trailed a large cattle heard from Colorado...into the Palo Duro Canyon, thus marking the opening of the Staked Plains and the beginning of the...West Texas Cattle industry...