He was struck by the picturesque American Falls of the Snake River in Idaho, where the federal government had constructed a seventy-mile canal and converted “about a quarter of a million acres of Idaho’s volcanic ash soil into productive lands that bloom as the rose.” He mused about one day settling near Snake River, “investing in some of its lands and locating, if I should happen to be compelled by stress of circumstances, to change my occupation.”
Around February, Micheaux banked his first one hundred dollars earned as a Pullman porter; his financial “modesty and frugality” would become a fixed lifetime habit. He soon realized, however, that he’d never be able to save much money out of his twenty-five-dollar monthly salary—considering that he had to pay for summer and winter uniforms at his own expense (twenty and twenty-two dollars, respectively); train meals (albeit discounted for employees); the regular laundering of his outfit; and rent for intervals spent in Chicago (no longer with his brother).
The tips were good for about another hundred dollars per month, Micheaux calculated, but that still wasn’t enough for a man who aspired to leave portering behind one day and do something grand with his life. That was the evil genius of the Pullman system, which kept porters on a taut leash. No wonder cheating and stealing from customers—and management—was so widespread, even, to an extent, “sanctioned by the company,” wrote Micheaux.
One lucrative tactic was the practice of “knockdowns,” which Micheaux called “a veritable disease among the colored employees.” At one point in the long runs, tickets were sold on board; the company revenue was always underreported by the white conductors, and the porters participated in the conspiracy in exchange for their “skim,” or “knockdown.” “‘Good Conductors,’” wrote Micheaux, “a name applied to ‘color blind’ cons, were worth seventy-five, and with the twenty-five dollars salary from the company, I averaged two hundred dollars a month for eighteen months.”
The Portland run was as far as you could get from headquarters, and tailor-made for knockdowns. For a year and a half, Micheaux worked this and other routes, savoring the “great opportunity of observation” train life afforded. He relished the colorful gamut of people as much as the diversity of places. The passengers often wanted to hear themselves talk, and he listened as they unbosomed themselves. Western sheepherders spoke to him of the tricks of sheepherding, farmers of farming.
As in Metropolis, Micheaux talked easily with affluent white people; equally important, he was also a good, watchful listener. In his novel The Forged Note, Micheaux’s alter ego, Sidney Wyeth, has a carousing, ragtime-playing friend who complains, “I’ve never seen you drink anything stronger than beer when you’ve been with me. You seem to go along with me, to see me and the others act a fool.”
Passengers wise and foolish were worth observing; besides advice, travelers gave him valued gifts of whiskey, cast-off clothing, and books. Passengers often left reading matter behind in the sleeping cars, and Micheaux absorbed everything he got his hands on: newspapers, muckraking articles in magazines, government land reports, history books, and novels. He absorbed a wide variety of literature, from Shakespeare’s plays to detective stories (he was an unabashed fan of the Nick Carter dime novels) as well as popular Westerns such as Owen Wister’s The Virginian. He avidly followed the works of the now-forgotten novelist and journalist Maude Radford Warren, who taught literature at the University of Chicago, and who wrote a series of stories extolling the achievements of women pioneers out West.
“What I liked best was some good story with a moral,” Micheaux wrote later, and he praised Warren’s stories as “very practical and true to life.” He enjoyed their travelogue quality, too, even seeking out the real-life settings of her tales. “Another feature of her writings which pleased me,” he wrote, “was the fact that many of the characters, unlike the central figures in many stories, who all become fabulously wealthy, were often only fairly successful and gained only a measure of wealth and happiness, that did not reach prohibitive proportions.”
As the trips accumulated, so did the money in his bank account. The knockdowns and graft certainly helped. But Micheaux was continually worried about the notorious company practice of employing incognito “spotters,” as the company detectives were called, and he had the queasy feeling that he was mired in wrongdoing and doomed to be caught. “While I was considered very fortunate by my fellow employees,” Micheaux explained later, “the whole thing filled me with disgust. I suffered from a nervous worry and fear of losing my position all the time, and really felt relieved when the end came and I was free to pursue a more commendable occupation.”
The finis was writ between Granger, Washington, and Portland, when Oscar had a run-in with a boozy Irish conductor who was clever at knockdowns but reluctant to yield the porter’s fair share. The conductor tried to whittle down Oscar’s slice of the extra, and the two had an argument. The debate was settled in Micheaux’s favor, but the conductor had been “spotted,” and was promptly fired. “They ‘got’ me on that trip” too, Micheaux wrote.
In the end, Oscar decided that the enormously profitable Pullman business was “greedy and inhuman,” oppressing its black porters with “near-slave” wages and conditions. He maintained in The Conquest that he had “no apologies or regrets to offer” for his part in the knockdowns and other cheating.
He didn’t mention the exact cause of his dismissal, but the company discharge records of “Oscar Michaux” state that he was let go on May 31, 1904, for “Abstracting $5.00 from purse of lady passe.”
So that was that. The “stress of circumstances” compelled Oscar to change his profession, or—to use a trick he worked more than once as a filmmaker—to change places.
To the end of his life, Micheaux nurtured a love and nostalgia for Chicago. It was a great and beautiful city, his first home away from Metropolis, which he had abandoned permanently. At the same time, Chicago disappointed, even “disgusted” him in certain ways. The Black Belt had its seamy side, marked by gambling dens, brothels, and a prevalent loafer and criminal presence. Several times in his novels Micheaux complained of the conspicuous “beer cans, drunken men and women” of the Stroll, though Chicago’s black underworld also enlivened his films.
While he found cities marvelous, in many ways Micheaux remained a small-town creature, a man of the soil who preferred travel and open land and untamed territory. The Pullman job had hooked him on traveling, and he daydreamed about living out West. Oscar felt “the spirit of Horace Greeley” ringing in his ears. “I come of pioneer stock,” he wrote in his 1943 novel, The Wind from Nowhere. “It seems to run in our family and blood to make conquest.”
He decided he ought to buy land somewhere on the vanishing frontier, but how and where? Micheaux considered the Snake River area in Idaho, but worried that the surroundings might be too arid. He thought hard about Iowa, until one day he spoke with an Iowa farmer in a smoking room during a train trip. The farmer told Micheaux he had paid eighty dollars per acre for his agricultural holdings in that state.
Eighty dollars an acre! “I concluded on one thing,” Micheaux explained later, “and that was, if one whose capital was under eight or ten thousand dollars, desired to own a good farm in the great central west he must go where the land was new or raw and undeveloped.”
Until he figured things out, he would continue to work hard and save money. Micheaux decamped to St. Louis, Missouri, where he presented a set of non-Pullman references, and underwent the same tutoring, and was promptly hired by the Southwest Division of the very same company that had just fired him, with the Chicago office none the wiser. Rooming on Pine Street in the Ville neighborhood of St. Louis, Oscar went back to work portering for Pullman on short runs to the west and south, while biding his time on his grander ambitions.
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 g
entler 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.
CHAPTER THREE
1904–1906 THE ROSEBUD
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 Chamberlain (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 aban
donment. (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.
Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only Page 4