Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only (5 page)

The St. Louis job afforded Micheaux his first extended exploration of the South, which had been home to his parents before the Civil War, and he fell in love with the region—its food, climate, terrain, and the gentler aspects of its culture. In many ways he felt himself a displaced Southerner. He abhorred the Jim Crow way of life, which suffocated the humanity out of black and white people alike; all the black passengers on trains crossing into the South had to be gathered up and escorted into segregated cars. But Micheaux realized early on that the North was not the pure haven of freedom that he and many other descendants of slavery had imagined it to be. The stories of his films would often swing between city and country, North and South, reflecting his divided loyalties.

In a sense, the romance of the West was his answer to the divided self. In
The Conquest,
Micheaux wrote of overhearing two waiters at a lunch counter in Council Bluffs, Iowa, talking about the Rosebud reservation in southern South Dakota, which was slated to be opened up by lottery to homesteaders in the fall of 1904. The following day, in Omaha, he encountered two Washington, D.C., surveyors en route to the Rosebud,
who encouraged him to write the Department of Interior for particulars on the land. The pamphlets he received in the mail boasted “deep black loam, with clay subsoil” for the earth, and sufficient average rainfall.

“This suited me better than any of the states or projects I had previously looked into,” Micheaux wrote in
The Conquest.
“Besides, I knew more about the mode of farming employed in that section of the country, it being somewhat similar to that in southern Illinois.”

Everywhere Micheaux went in the summer of 1904 people were talking about the Rosebud. The newspapers were full of government advertisements for the upcoming lottery. By then Micheaux had saved the remarkable sum of $2,343, a nest egg he thought would be sufficient to purchase a decent homestead. Eager to get in on America's last great frontier, he made the decision to go. “Get there, begin with the beginning, and grow up with the country”: that was his credo.

North and South Dakota, part of the Louisiana Purchase, were admitted to the union in 1889. Most of South Dakota's white population had streamed to the wild country for the Black Hills gold rush that had erupted less than twenty years earlier, about 1870. Not all the fortune hunters got rich or stayed on, and the ranches and so-called towns of the region—few and far apart, most of them making Metropolis look large and sophisticated—were spread over tens of thousands of square miles of undulating plains, badlands, and rugged mountains. Besides cattlemen, the new state was inhabited mainly by lingering cowboys and a number of Indian tribes, including some not yet vanquished.

The Rosebud Reservation had been part of the Great Sioux Reservation, which was ceded to Red Cloud's warring Oglala tribe in an 1868 treaty that closed the vast expanse between the Missouri River and the Big Horn Mountains to white settlement. The land was held in common by Indian tribes until 1888, when it was divided into six autonomous reservations, one of which, the Rosebud, was designated for Chief Spotted Tail and the Brule Sioux. The Rosebud covered parts of northern Nebraska and a large portion of South Dakota that ranged west of the Missouri River, stretching nearly to the sacred Black Hills. Its name came from the wild yellow and pink flower that carpeted this part of the Great Plains, whose sweet fragrance charged the air in the spring; rosebuds were also used in making a “savory dessert, much prized by the Sioux,” as Micheaux biographer and Western historian Betti Carol VanEpps-Taylor has noted.

“The soil of these plains is exceedingly fine,” Lewis and Clark wrote
while exploring the territory in 1804, and after the 1868 treaty the U.S. government began pressuring the Sioux to open portions of the Rosebud to farmers, cattle ranchers, and businessmen, selling uninhabited 160–acre allotments as surplus land to raise cash, ostensibly to support Indian land-use projects.

An early attempt to open the Indian lands had been defeated in Congress in 1902, but in April 1904 Congress approved a negotiated agreement with leaders of the Brule Sioux, and on May 13, President Theodore Roosevelt announced that 2,400 allotments would be made available by lottery for homestead settlement in the fall. These land parcels, dug out of an eastern chunk of the Rosebud, would be assimilated by Gregory County, South Dakota. (Gregory was the designated name of the government townsite planned at the western edge of the county.)

Studying the government land surveys, Micheaux concluded that Gregory County might be ideal for farming. “Two hundred miles north, corn will not mature,” he wrote. “Two hundred miles south, spring wheat is not grown; two hundred west, the altitude is too high to insure sufficient rainfall to produce a crop; but the reservation lands are in such a position that winter wheat, spring wheat, oats, rye, corn, flax, and barley do well.”

One month after Roosevelt's proclamation, according to one South Dakota historian writing fifty years later, the new town of Gregory already boasted “250 buildings and 500 inhabitants that filled an area which had consisted of four surveyors' holes and a stake just the August before.” Other tiny towns dotting the county started to mushroom with prospective settlers, capitalists, speculators, and all manner of opportunists and miscreants. Each young town was hoping to become a shipping point for cattle drives and farm products, and the towns competed fiercely over water and railhead advantages, and over which would become the county seat.

 

The notarized registration was slated to commence at 9 (
A.M.
on Tuesday, July 5, 1904, and to terminate at 6
P.M.
on Saturday, July 23. The incorporated towns of Yankton (closest to Iowa), Fairfax (along the Nebraska state line), Bonesteel (west of Fairfax in Gregory County), and Chamber
lain (in central South Dakota, near the junction of the White and Missouri rivers), would serve as the official registration points.

Early on July 5, Micheaux took a train from Great Bend, Kansas, where he had stopped to visit his family, to South Dakota. The closest stop was the town of Bonesteel, the county terminus of the Chicago & North Western Railroad, but it was notoriously “crowded and lawless” and “overrun with tinhorn gamblers,” in Micheaux's words. Instead Micheaux chose Chamberlain, the farthest outpost, but a large town known for its superior hotel accommodations and service from three separate railroads. In Chamberlain, on July 28, a blindfolded child would draw out of a canvas bag the first envelope with a completed government form. The first person selected would have first choice of the available 160-acre sections at four dollars per acre; the second would have second choice; and so on until all the 2,400 allotments were dispersed.

Arriving on the afternoon of the same day, Micheaux was taken aback by the sea of notary tents and booths swarmed by hundreds of people—“all ages and descriptions,” he wrote later, “the greater part of them being from Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Minnesota, North Dakota, Kansas, and Nebraska.” He stood in a long line, swore an oath that he was a citizen of the United States and twenty-one years of age (not quite true), and signed his application. By the end of the day, ten thousand applicants had registered in Chamberlain alone. By the end of the week, Micheaux estimated, he was likely facing 75,000 competitors; deflated by the odds, he left Chamberlain and returned to his family in Great Bend.

Later that month, he read in the newspaper that more than 107,000 prospective homesteaders had registered for a mere 2,400 claims in the Rosebud. In due time he received official notification of his number in the mail: 6504. He had no chance. That same day, he lost fifty-five dollars “out of my pocket” and left for St. Louis. There he tried to boost his spirits by roaming the spectacular exhibits and amusements of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, the World's Fair that was spread over 1,200 acres in downtown St. Louis, feting the one hundredth anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase treaty.

In the weeks that followed, Micheaux had a few work prospects as well as diversions. In September he portered on a limited World's Fair run between St. Louis and New York. There was not much “knocking down,” but the salary and tips added up.

Losing the homestead lottery gnawed at him, but Micheaux had not
been idle in Chamberlain. He had gotten wind of the prospect of “relinquishments,” homestead claims that had been forfeited, often by death or abandonment. (Just as often, the relinquishments were manipulated by speculators poised to turn a profit on the turnover sale.) Claimholders filing to relinquish their land could sell their allotments to another party, the price varying with the land quality and the eagerness of the seller, or buyer.

By October, Micheaux had banked another $300. He resolved to spend the bulk of his savings on a relinquishment.

 

Leaving St. Louis on the night of October 4, carrying $2,500 in cash, Micheaux boarded a train for Omaha. There he caught the Chicago & North Western “one train a day” line, this time to Bonesteel. The train was “loaded from end to end” with people talking up relinquishments. “I was the only negro on the train and an object of many inquiries as to where I was going. Some of those whom I told that I was going to buy a relinquishment seemingly regarded it as a joke, judging from the meaning glances cast at those nearest them.”

Arriving in the rowdy town of Bonesteel, Micheaux encountered many more such “meaning glances,” and worse: his autobiographical fiction suggests that this was the first time the young man encountered blatant race prejudice. The town was awash with “locators,” persons who claimed familiarity with the area and drove land-seekers around to look over the best properties. The tour itself was gratis, but if land was purchased the locator was entitled to charge a substantial finder's fee.

Micheaux tried enlisting a locator, but the first one he approached declined to escort him. When he finally found a second one, a buggy-driver at a livery stable, the second man, called Slater, told him that the first locator had already warned him that he'd be a fool “to waste his money hauling a d—nigger around the reservation,” because surely Micheaux didn't have enough money to buy a decent relinquishment.

Micheaux flushed angrily. “Show me what I want,” he declared, “and I will produce the money.” He demanded to be driven to the far west end of Gregory County, where the relinquishments were said to be cheaper, the soil richer. The two men rode in silence for the three miles from Bonesteel to the reservation line, from which the newly opened lands stretched for thirty miles to the west.

This was Micheaux's first tour of the Rosebud, the land he had dreamed of and read about, and in person it seemed to him as beautiful as “the hollow of God's hand.” The land cast a spell over him. “To the Northeast the Missouri River wound its way, into which empties the Whetstone Creek, the breaks of which resembled miniature mountains, falling abruptly, then rising to a point where the dark shale sides glistened in the sunlight,” he rhapsodized in
The Conquest.
“It was my longest drive in a buggy. We could go for perhaps three or four miles on a table-like plateau, then drop suddenly into small canyon-like ditches and rise abruptly to the other side.”

After about fifteen miles, they arrived at the village of Herrick, “a collection of frame shacks with one or two houses, many roughly constructed sod buildings, the long brown grass hanging from between the sod, giving it a frizzled appearance.” Here they paused to listen to “a few boosters and mountebanks,” who gestured and declaimed with “rustic eloquence” on the virtues of Herrick as the prospective county seat and “the coming metropolis of the west.” Herrick was vying to replace the present county seat of Fairfax, about twenty miles east.

Another eight or nine miles to the northwest, they came upon Burke, a similarly unimpressive podunk striving to become the next county seat. Around Burke, Micheaux noticed, the land was sandy and full of pits, “into which the buggy wheels dropped with a grinding sound, and where magnesia rock cropped out of the soil.” Too sandy for proper farming, he decided, so the pair drove on. Micheaux was growing apprehensive.

They passed a growing number of spring-fed streams. Then, three miles west of Burke, they ascended a steep hill topped by a grassy plateau. “There lays one of the claims,” said the locator, pointing.

“I was struck by the beauty of the scenery,” Micheaux wrote later, “and it seemed to charm and bring me out of the spirit of depression the sandy stretch brought upon me. Stretching for miles to the northwest and to the south, the land would rise in a gentle slope to a hogback, and as gently slope away to a draw, which drained to the south. Here the small streams emptied into a larger one, winding along like a snake's track, and thickly wooded with a growth of small hardwood timber.

“It was beautiful. From each side the land rose gently like huge wings, and spread away as far as the eye could reach.”

On a small rise, at the highest point of the relinquishment, rested a marker: “SWC, SWQ, Sec. 29-97-72 W. 5th P.M.” Slater translated for
Micheaux: “The southwest corner of the southwest quarter of section twenty-nine, township ninety-seven, and range seventy-two, west of the fifth principal meridian.”

Nearby to the south could be glimpsed yet another budding town, the hilltop burg of Dallas. To the northwest about four miles was Gregory. All around was beautiful country and blue skies.

They headed back to Bonesteel, where Micheaux dreamed all night of his perfect relinquishment. The original claim had been drawn by a girl who lived across the Missouri, and the next day they set out to visit the girl and her parents. He had expected to pay as much as $1,800 for relinquished land, but now he recognized that he wouldn't have to pay that much for a claim as far west as Gregory. He dickered with the girl and her parents, getting the price slashed to $375. Then he dickered with Slater, the locator, knocking his two hundred dollar fee down to eighty.

Micheaux paid the first installment of $160 on his 160 acres in Chamberlain on October 14, 1904. Then, because it was too late in the season to plant crops or build on the land, he returned to St. Louis.

 

From St. Louis he wrote to his erstwhile sweetheart Jessie in Murphysboro. Their correspondence had been intermittent of late, and Micheaux couldn't decide how he felt about the younger girl. But she was about to graduate from high school, and in her letters she hailed him as “grand and noble, as well as practical” for having invested in a relinquished homestead. He promised to visit her at Christmas.

After Teddy Roosevelt won the November 1904 presidential election, Micheaux took a Pullman job with a “special party, consisting mostly of New York capitalists and millionaires,” traveling from St. Louis down through the Southwest, crossing the Rio Grande at Eagle Pass, Texas, then cutting across central Mexico by way of Torreón, Zacatecas, Aguascalientes, Guadalajara, Puebla, and Tehauntapec. They sailed from Salina Cruz down the west coast to Valparaíso, Chile, heading inland to Santiago, and from there via the Trans-Andean railway to western Argentina.

At Mendoza, they visited an ancient city that had been destroyed and rebuilt fifty years earlier after an earthquake and fire, but fears of the bubonic plague sweeping Brazil sent the party scurrying back to Valparaíso, where they promptly set sail for Salina Cruz. They spent time
originally intended for a tour of Argentina “snoopin' around the land of the Montezumas,” which was filled with “gaudy Spanish women and begging peons,” in Micheaux's words. Finally, after trekking into the highlands to visit the cathedrals of Cuernavaca, they headed north, passing through Puebla, San Luis Potosí, and Monterrey, en route to Laredo, Texas.

For a man with wanderlust, this was a high point of his life; though he would later boast of international travel in his film publicity, it's unlikely that Micheaux ever again traveled so freely or extensively outside U.S. borders. And there were other benefits to the trip: “I became well enough acquainted with the liberal millionaires and so useful in serving their families,” Micheaux wrote later, “that I made $575 on the trip, besides bringing back so many gifts and curiosities of all kinds that I had enough to divide up with a good many of my friends.”