James P. Beckwourth

James Pierson Beckwourth (born  April 26, 1798 or 1800 as James P. Beckwith in Frederick County , Virginia , †  October 29, 1866 in northern Colorado ), also Jim Beckwourth , was a slave , trapper , Indian chief, soldier , trader , Innkeeper and scout in the Wild West . He was involved in almost all major events and developments in the exploration, economic development and settlement of the American West, without ever assuming a leading role.

Former chroniclers of the Wild West ignored his memoirs The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth , published in 1856, because of their sometimes ridiculous exaggerations and dismissed him as a boor. It was only since historical studies systematically developed the sources of the 19th century that Beckwourth has been accepted as a partially unreliable witness after his eventful life, in details like around the campfire, but generally credible witness.

Due to his descent from a mother who was considered black under the laws of her time and his birth as a slave, James P. Beckwourth has been regarded as an early representative of the emancipated African-Americans since the civil rights movement and is represented in several books for children and young people as a role model.

James P. Beckwourth, around 1860

Life

James Beckwourth lived in a time marked by the expansion of the United States to the west. In 1803, Thomas Jefferson bought the French colony of Louisiana from Napoléon Bonaparte in the Louisiana Purchase, roughly doubling the territory of the United States. In the first third of the 19th century the task was to explore the new territories. The first economic use was the fur trade . In 1821 Mexico gained independence from Spain , in 1835 the Americans founded the Republic of Texas on what was once Mexican soil , and trade with the Spanish-influenced southwest of the continent came to the fore. Beginning in the 1840s and intensified after the Mexican-American War 1846/48 and the cession of California , Arizona , Nevada , New Mexico , Utah and parts of Colorado and Wyoming in the subsequent Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo , the settlement of the west became the goal. The California gold rush from 1848 accelerated the development. At the beginning the Indian inhabitants of the west were pushed and displaced from the constantly shifting frontier , the border between settlement areas and civilization, but towards the end of Beckwourth's life the conflicts broke out and the Indian wars entered the decisive phase.

Origin and youth

I was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, on the 26th of April, 1798 - this is how Beckwourth's only book begins, written in the winter of 1854/55 from his stories, which his editor Thomas D. Bonner noted, edited and published in the following year by Harper & Brothers in New York. There are two mistakes in this sentence: Beckwourth was not born in Fredericksburg , but in Frederick County, north of it, and the year does not seem to be correct either, a birth 1800 is more likely, because otherwise information about his life would not match verifiable facts.

Beckwourth was the son of Sir Jennings Beckwith (* 1762, † 1835), a farmer in Virginia from an old English family, whose descent can be traced back to one of the knights William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. The family had considerable influence in England: One ancestor was Sir Roger Beckwith (* approx. 1630; † 1700), who was awarded the title of Baronet Beckwith, of Aldborough in Yorkshire , in 1681 , his son, also named Roger (* 1682; † 1743), was Mayor of Leeds and 1707 High Sheriff of Yorkshire County. On his death, the title passed to his younger brother Marmaduke Beckwith (* 1687, † 1780), who emigrated to the British colony of Virginia at the beginning of the 18th century . Jennings Beckwith, his grandson, ran only a relatively small farm, suggesting that the sizable family holdings had been fragmented within two generations.

Sir Jennings had married Catherine Miskell in 1787, with whom he had at least five, and according to Beckwourth even thirteen children. Catherine died between 1794 and 1800 at the latest. The widower had another son, James Pierson, with a slave who is believed to be a mulatto and whose name is not known. Between 1801 and 1803 he broke ties with Virginia and headed west. In 1809 at the latest, he settled in Missouri and in 1810 acquired a large piece of land below St. Charles between the Mississippi River and Missouri River .

The property in Missouri, like the entire region, was undeveloped and the settlers were pioneers. Beckwourth described the area as "howling wilderness, inhabited only by wild animals and merciless savages." Even nearby St. Louis was only a small outpost of civilization, inhabited almost exclusively by French or Spanish fur traders . Whites now pushed into the country, which was only inhabited by Indians and roamed by trappers who trade with the Indians, built small and large farms, and Anglo-Americans took over the fur trade from the French. Conflicts inevitably arose with the Indians. Beckwourth describes in vivid terms how, as a child, he found a whole family of friends with parents and eight children with their throats cut and scalped . His father and other men in the area set out in retaliation and after two days brought back 18 Indian scalps.

Jennings Beckwith did not treat his son as a slave, as evidenced by the fact that James was sent to a school in St. Louis for several years at the age of ten. At the age of 14 he started his apprenticeship with a blacksmith in St. Louis, where he stayed until he was 19. He ran away when he got into a violent argument with his master about staying out at night and getting in touch with a young woman. He wanted to flee to northern Illinois and work in the lead mines that had just opened on the lower reaches of the Fever River , today's Galena River in Jo Daviess County . The fact that he was followed there by his master on the keelboat , brought back and handed over to his father, is a clear indication of his legal status as a slave. Jennings Beckwith settled the dispute with the blacksmith and released James from slavery. This immediately set off north again and went to the Fever River.

In Galena, the United States Army and the Sauk and Fox peoples signed a treaty to tolerate the mines, which ended the conflicts that had been frequent up until then. Beckwourth said he made friends with Indians, went hunting with them, learned useful skills for the wilderness from them and came into closer contact with their culture and religious ideas. After 18 months he left the region and drove down the Mississippi to New Orleans at the mouth. The stay ended after only ten days because of a severe fever. To recover, he returned to his parents' house in St. Louis.

At this point in the résumé there is a gap of two years (assuming a birth of 1800) or about four years if you believe your own information. James Beckwourth's stay during this time is unproven. Shortly after the publication of his book there were rumors about this period too, none of which can be traced back to reliable sources. When and why he changed his maiden name Beckwith to Beckwourth cannot be proven.

Beckwourth as a trapper - illustration of the first edition

As a trapper in the Rocky Mountains

In 1823 Beckwourth was hired by William H. Ashley for the fur trading company Ashley & Henry (later the Rocky Mountain Fur Company ). He had just returned from a small campaign against the Arikaree on the middle Missouri River and needed more men for a one or more year stay on the upper reaches and the tributaries of the Missouri River in the Rocky Mountains . The careers of almost all famous Mountain Men began with this company , including Thomas Fitzpatrick , Jim Bridger , Jedediah Smith , the Milton brothers and William Sublette and many more. In 1824 Ashley & Henry had around 120 trappers in the mountains.

In his self-portrayal, Beckwourth becomes the outstanding hero among famous men. He saves his companions countless times from the most diverse dangers, be it through perseverance and hardship on long marches through the wintry mountains without sufficient provisions, through tremendous luck or skill in the hunt, or by being in the right place at the right time and being courageous intervenes. He claims to have saved William Ashley's life three times within a very short time. In his memoirs there are neither the moments of danger nor an explicit mention of Beckwourth. There are no other independent sources either.

It is credible that Ashley hired the trained blacksmith and blacksmith Beckwourth as a wrangler . He was responsible for the trappers' horses. This fits with Beckwourth's reports of the recurring task of buying horses from friendly Indian peoples, because other (and often enough the same) Indian peoples practiced horse theft as a sport and test of courage for young warriors and the trappers were particularly often victims of these raids.

In the late summer of 1823 he was sent to look for horses from the Pawnee , but could not fulfill the order because of the early onset of winter. Trapped in ice and snow, he spent the winter at the Kansa-Post fur trading post owned by the Chouteaux fur trading family from St. Louis, near present-day Kansas City , and worked as a fur dresser and packer.

After the ice drift on the Missouri, he returned by boat to St. Louis in the early summer of 1824, where he met Ashley, who had already thought he was dead. Beckwourth extended his service and went on an expedition that was influential in the development of the West. Ashley had received news that in February 1824, the company's hunters, headed by Jedediah Smith, with the help of the Cheyenne and Crow Indians, had found a flat and easily usable pass over the main ridge of the Rocky Mountains . The South Pass provided access to the western Rocky Mountains and their abundant beaver populations, which until then could only be reached with great effort and without loads and therefore hardly explored. Ultimately, the pass also opened the way to the Pacific Ocean .

Ashley went to the mountains with new employees. Some of the men went up the North Platte River under the direction of Thomas Fitzpatrick to fetch the skins from Smith and his team, Ashley, Beckwourth and others went south to look for the department that Beckwourth made last fall should get the horses. They found her with nearly exhausted food supplies, but well-stocked fur stores. They spent part of the winter in a Pawnee camp, and Beckwourth describes a successful winter hunt by the Indians on one of the large herds of bison . In the spring they climbed up into the mountains and to the Green River beyond the ridge, on the upper reaches of which they planned the first of the future annual rendezvous for the summer . Fitzpatrick and Ashley thus opened the direct route from Missouri via the Rocky Mountains between summer 1824 and spring 1825.

The rendezvous was very successful. All of the company's trappers came together on a tributary of the Green River, delivered their furs and were paid to do so. They also got supplies and barter goods for the next season. At this first rendezvous in 1825 not only 91 of their own Trapper Ashleys came, but also some Indians of the Cheyenne and Crow and even fur hunters of the British Hudson's Bay Company , who broke their contracts and sold their skins to the Americans. In the years that followed, the meetings quickly developed into large gatherings, at which Indians from the near and far area also arrived and offered their skins for exchange. They were "paid for" with diluted whiskey, glass beads and colored textiles; the greatest profit arose from this exploitation. In addition, the rendezvous became orgy-like celebrations, which led to the spread of STDs , especially syphilis , among the Mountain Men and the Indians.

After the meeting, Ashley returned with some of his men, including Jedediah Smith and Beckwourth, and all of the previous season's furs, via the Bighorn River and Yellowstone Rivers on the northern route to Missouri. There they met a unit of the US Army, with which they drove back on the river towards St. Louis.

According to his own account, Beckwourth met a woman again in St. Louis and became engaged to her. After just a week in town, Ashley told him to return to the mountains with a message. Beckwourth portrays the job as urgent and well paid; he accepted it in order to increase his small fortune and to improve the living conditions of the future family. He did not return to St. Louis until at least twelve years later, a month after the waiting bride received false news of his death and then married someone else. It is unlikely that the story is true, that the woman even existed. Beckwourth's commentator refers the entire story into the realm of fable and assumes that Beckwourth's editor invented it according to the literary taste of the time or composed it from several parts of Beckwourth's story.

In any case, Beckwourth was returning to the mountains. This was the first time there was a major conflict with the Blackfoot Indians. Nevertheless, Beckwourth opened a temporary trading post with this dreaded people in the summer. He moved in with them as a representative of the fur trading company, examined their furs and decided on the price.

Beckwourth knocks down his wife - illustration of the first edition

From this point in time at the latest, Beckwourth's outward appearance could no longer be distinguished from that of an Indian. He dressed in Indian fashion, adorned himself like the Indians and wore his long, black hair in the Indian style. The veracity of his account of life in the Blackfoot village is controversial. According to his own statements, the Indians attached such importance to him as an agent of the fur traders that he was offered the daughter of a chief and he lived with her. When the Indians brought three scalps of white hunters into the village a few days later and began a traditional victory dance, Beckwourth forbade his wife to attend the celebration. When she danced anyway, he struck her down with his hatchet . According to Beckwourth's account, everyone thought the woman was dead, but instead of attacking the perpetrator, the chief blamed his daughter, and that was not enough he immediately turned Beckwourth over to Beckwourth's younger sister. After it was found that the first daughter was still alive that night, Beckwourth spent the rest of his stay with both women. The Blackfoot as a matrilineal society knew the marriage of the widower with the unmarried sister of a deceased woman ( Sororat ) and also the polygyny , so this account can be correct. The deal was closed in just twenty days, and Beckwourth set off on a rendezvous with the beaver furs and some horses he had bought . He left his two wives behind.

At the rendezvous in 1826, Ashley sold the company to his previous captains Jedediah Smith, Tom Fitzpatrick and William Sublette, and Beckwourth subsequently describes in detail how closely he worked with Sublette. The other stories about his adventures cannot be verified. He reports bloody battles, with the number of Indians allegedly involved being grotesquely exaggerated. He reports about an escape on foot that he managed to live and die with as a long-distance run. He draws recognizable from the story told over and over by the campfires, how John Colter ran away from the Blackfoot on the Yellowstone River for about ten kilometers in 1808. At Beckwourth, it is already over 150 km (95 miles) that he claims to have run in a day, followed by no fewer than two to three hundred Indians while “their bullets whizzed past me, their screams rang painfully in my ears, and so did I. I could almost feel the knife making a circle around my skull ”.

Not only Beckwourth himself told of these and other adventures around the campfire. Others also came up with ideas to entertain their listeners. The trapper colleague Caleb Greenwood is credited with being the first to tell of Beckwourth's Indian origins. At the rendezvous in 1826 he is said to have described that Beckwourth was actually the child of a Crow chief who was robbed as a baby during a Cheyenne attack and sold to a white family. The story spread immediately among the trappers and the various Indian peoples at the rendezvous and was widely believed given Beckwourth's appearance and demeanor.

Beckwourth as an Indian warrior - illustration of the first edition

Warchief of the Crow Indians

For the fall hunt of the same year, Beckwourth went with a group of trappers led by Jim Bridger and Robert Campell to the upper Snake River around the mountain range of the Teton Range . The region was dangerous because the hunting grounds of three great Indian peoples collided there, the Crow, the Blackfoot and the Northern Shoshone . He says he was captured there by a crowd of Crow Indians and brought to their village. Residents of the village recognized him and knew the story of his birth as Crow, he was welcomed by the tribe and recognized by a family as a supposed son. He was immediately married to the daughter of a respected chief after his portrayal. At first Beckwourth claims that his status was only beneficial for his fur-hunting, but he took part in the activities of his new relatives from the beginning and went on raids with them. Contrary to his own description of the raids with forty to several hundred warriors and a strict hierarchy, four, five or at most ten men are more likely, even large groups are hardly ever more than 50 warriors. One sneaked to neighbors or groups of other peoples passing through and tried to capture horses, perhaps scalps too. They only set out over greater distances when it came to whole herds of horses.

After Arapooish's death, Beckwourth becomes Warchief of the Crow - Illustration in the first edition

Even with his first attack, Beckwourth managed to defeat an opponent with a so-called coup in close combat. With that he had achieved the status of a warrior according to the Crow's understanding. In further fights he distinguished himself in such a way that he was accepted as chief. This was not a rare leadership position; all experienced warriors were chiefs. What is unusual is that he claims to have been promoted to the entire people's council of war. After all, immediately before his death, Chief Arapooish is said to have named Beckwourth as his successor in the role of chief war chief. War campaigns and smaller skirmishes with the Assiniboine , Lakota , Cheyenne , Comanches and the particularly dangerous Arikaree as well as the traditional enemies of the Crow, the Blackfoot, are described in the following. There are also contacts to the Northern Shoshone and the Kiowa . Beckwourth always portrays himself as the central figure in all popular activities.

The living and working space of the Crow extended along the eastern flank of the Rocky Mountains between the river systems of the North Platte River and the upper reaches of the Missouri River and its tributaries and thus to large parts of today's US states Wyoming and Montana .

Linked to Beckwourth's rise was that he married at least one other woman; this, too, was normal behavior for a warrior in Crow matrilineal society. Of these women only the daughter of a high-ranking Crow, called the little wife, is mentioned in detail. With her, Beckwourth had the only child mentioned in his memoirs. The Crow came up with several names for him: Morning Star , Bloody Arm , Medicine Calf, and Enemy of Horses . He takes credit for the fact that the Crow were the greatest people to be consistently friendly to the whites. Although they also robbed trappers of competing companies and stole horses from all strangers in their area, no white man is said to have been killed by a crow in Beckwourth's time.

He continued to hunt fur but stopped selling to his previous partners, instead he and the Crow took their skins to trading posts for the American Fur Company , Smith's main competitor , Fitzpatrick & Sublette . He worked closely with Kenneth McKenzie , one of the most famous fur traders for the American Fur Company, and became the company's agent with the Crow. On behalf of and on behalf of the Company, he built a fort at the mouth of the Bighorn River in what is now Montana and traded with the various groups of the Crow and other friendly peoples. He received an annual income of $ 3,000 from the fur trading company, the equivalent of running a trading post. The company also supported Beckwourth and the Crow with weapons in a particularly extensive campaign against the Blackfoot, who worked under contract with the Hudson's Bay Company and were thus competitors of the American Fur Company.

In Beckwourth's memoirs, his time as chief of the Crow takes up most of the space; almost half of the book deals with these eight or nine years. He describes fighting techniques, life in the village, customs and traditions of family life, dispute settlement and the relationship with other peoples in the region. He approaches the topic of mythology and religion several times, but never makes statements that go beyond commonplace. He portrays the competition between two totemic crow warrior groups as a competition between warriors for honor and position among the people. When building a medicine hut, he describes the rough sequence of ritual activities, but does not mention any ritual backgrounds.

In early 1837 Beckwourth visited the American Fur Company's Fort Union trading post , settled accounts with the manager there, and boarded a boat that took him to St. Louis on the Missouri. According to him, he was dissatisfied with life in the wild; he had gone to the mountains "to quench a youthful thirst for adventure". "But what do I have to show for so much wasted energy and such a collection of merciless deeds?" According to documents received from the company, however, he should not be hired for the following season because he did not adequately represent the interests of the company. Much had changed in St. Louis in the twelve years or more he had been away. His father had returned to Virginia and died there, his brothers had moved away, he met only two sisters again. He also describes his encounters with William Henry Ashley , Thomas Fitzpatrick and William Sublette .

In the summer he returned briefly to the mountains and the crow. According to his own account, he prevented a large-scale campaign by all Crow against the whites. But the stay was short. After five months he went back to St. Louis.

Pine Leaf , the Indian heroine - illustration of the first edition

Beckwourth's book also contains a romantic love story while staying with the Crow. Although he was already married to several women, Beckwourth, according to his own accounts, directed his interest to an outstandingly portrayed young Indian woman named Pine Leaf (pine needle). When she was twelve years old, she vowed not to marry until she avenged her brother's death by killing one hundred enemies with her own hands. Having grown into a woman, Beckwourth describes her as an extraordinary warrior of her people. With and next to her he fought countless bloody fights, but she always rejected his advances. This section contains several of the few comical passages in his story. When asked when she would marry him, she once replied: "When the pine needles turn yellow," and Beckwourth says he is hoping for the next autumn until he notices that conifers do not change color. At the second attempt, she promised to marry him if he would find “a red-haired Indian woman”. This romance did not have a happy ending either. After Beckwourth returned to the Crow, she was finally convinced of his qualities and promised to marry him. But he already broke out of existence as Mountain Man , five weeks later he left the mountains, the Crow and his bride. This figure is not made up, it is described in 1856 under the name Woman Chief (female chief) as a warrior of the Crow by Edwin T. Denig, a chronicler of the Indians on the upper reaches of the Missouri. However, the details described by Beckwourth could not be verified.

Soldier in Florida

In St. Louis, the US Army was looking for trappers and mountain men to volunteer for the second war against the Seminoles , which had been waged in Florida since 1835 . Beckwourth reported to the Missouri Volunteers on the advice of William Sublette and was transferred by ship on the Mississippi to New Orleans and from there across the Gulf of Mexico to Tampa . In his memoirs he describes himself as a messenger rider who is always in the right place at the right time, despite all conceivable dangers, to deliver militarily decisive messages. According to his own statement, he also served as a scout and intervened in combat operations several times. The pay books of the Missouri volunteer units have been preserved; after that, James Beckwourth was not a soldier. But he was employed as a civilian wagon master in the convoy for a few months .

Trade with Indian Peoples, Mexico and California

In the early summer of 1838 Beckwourth was back in St. Louis, working for Indian traders at the Fort Velasques trading post on the Arkansas River . Although the Cheyenne , the most important people in the region, were enemies with the Crow and they knew his rank as a former war chief, he developed friendly relations with them, which he used when he joined the largest trading company Bent-St. Vrain switched. He worked during the summer season at Fort Laramie , a civil trading post on the North Platte River in what is now southeastern Wyoming. Later in the year he went south to the Mexican Nuevo Mexico and founded with former acquaintances together its own trading business.

In October 1842 he married Luisa Sandoval, a young Spanish woman from Taos . With her and a few other independent traders, he built the Pueblo trading post on the upper Arkansas River and thus entered into direct competition with his previous employers Bent and St. Vrain and their posts at Bent's Old Fort . With the proceeds from the 1843 season, he planned to start trading on the Santa Fe Trail with the capital of Nuevo Mexico . But shortly before Beckwourth's arrival, Governor Armijo closed the borders to all traders. On the one hand, the conflicts between the United States and Mexico over the independence of the Republic of Texas had escalated; on the other hand, in the early summer of 1843, 250 American wagons with goods valued at around $ 450,000 had arrived and had dominated the local Spanish economy. After Beckwourth was unable to sell his goods in Santa Fe , he decided to move on to California, also Mexico , on the Old Spanish Trail . In January 1844 he arrived in Pueblo de Los Angeles in what is now the metropolitan area of Los Angeles and was able to sell his goods successfully.

Beckwourth in California in 1855

California

Beckwourth stayed in California until 1846; possibly he also commuted as a trader between the Arkansas River and Upper California . According to his own statements, he was involved in the Bear Flag Revolution , the first uprising by American settlers against the Mexican authorities. When he heard of the outbreak of the Mexican-American War , he returned to the United States with some colleagues. According to Beckwourth, they previously caught 1,800 Mexican horses and brought them with them as spoils of war. As a result, he worked demonstrably as a messenger rider and interpreter, perhaps also as a scout for the US Army and retrieved stolen army horses from the Indian peoples. Because of his previous activities with the Crow, this activity was misunderstood by some chroniclers; they accused him of professional horse theft. In 1847 he was involved in the suppression of the uprising of the Indian population of Taos against the American military administration, in which his former employer Charles Bent was slain as interim governor. For a short time he worked as an Army courier on the Santa Fe Trail between Santa Fe and Fort Leavenworth .

From 1848 he stayed in California. At first he was again a courier for the army administration in Monterey . When the California gold rush began in 1848/49 , he opened a trading shop in Sonoma . He was able to successfully sell the business and went to Sacramento , where he lived mainly on Monte as a gambler . In late 1849 he stayed briefly in the Placerville gold fields on the American River . It is not known whether he dug for gold himself.

From April 1850 he lived in the mountains of the Sierra Nevada above the gold fields and built one of the lowest mountain passes in the Sierra on a road through the mountains over the Beckwourth Pass , which he had discovered . His route, known as the Beckwourth Trail , led from Pyramid Lake and the Truckee River on the east side of the mountains in today's Nevada over the pass and between two branches of the Feather River to the gold fields and settlement areas of Northern California. It saved gold prospectors and settlers about 150 miles (240 km) and several strenuous climbs, including Donner Pass, on the way from the eastern United States to auspicious California .

The road construction was supposed to be financed by the businessmen of the villages that were opened up through Beckwourths Straße. The Mayor of Marysville finally vouched for the total. At the end of July / beginning of August 1851, the first wagons rolled over the new road. But because Marysville was badly damaged by fire twice on August 31 and September 10, 1851, the city was insolvent.

Later that year Beckwourth first met the corrupt justice of the peace Thomas D. Bonner. In the spring of 1852 Beckwourth opened a ranch with his last money with a small hotel and trading post in the Sierra Nevada on his road, from which today's Beckwourth was to develop. Bonner spent the winter of 1854/55 there, and Beckwourth told him about his life. Bonner noted the stories, revised them in the course of 1855 and offered them to Harper & Brothers , the publishers of Harper's Magazine , where they appeared in 1856. Beckwourth, who was entitled to 50% of the royalties according to the contract with Bonner, was initially unaware of this. Only a few years later did he try in vain to collect his share from Bonner. In 1856 Beckwourth tried again to get the cost of road construction in Marysville reimbursed, but without success: the city had shrunk significantly after the gold rush subsided, the former mayor was no longer available as a witness in the region and the city council denied any payment obligation.

Daguerreotype : Beckwourth probably in Denver, ca.1860

Return to the East

Beckwourth's stay in California is documented for the last time in November 1858. In August 1859, the Kansas City newspapers reported the return of the Missouri state son. But it didn't last long in the Great Plains . In the same year he went to the recently founded city of Denver below the Rocky Mountains. There he ran a shop and saloon of the trading company AP Velasquez & Company , founded by a relative of his former employer Louis Velasquez. His former colleague Jim Bridger also worked for the company at the same time . Beckwourth's appreciation as a trader is reflected in his salary of $ 75 a month versus $ 25 for Bridger. He was also appointed by the city council as a local agent for contacts with the Indians. He was to take care of the affairs of all Indians who visited the city for trade or other purposes. In 1860 he married Elisabeth Ledbetter, a much younger black woman. Their only child died in the summer of 1864 at the age of one year and eight months; shortly afterwards Beckwourth separated from his wife and moved with a Crow Indian woman to the South Platte River outside of town.

In the summer of 1864, citizens of Denver had formed the Third Regiment of Colorado Volunteers in response to growing conflicts with the Indians, particularly the Cheyenne . A small gold rush had made the city grow and the many whites pushed the Indians out of their preferred habitats. These fought back with occasional raids on suburbs. The regular US army was bound by the Civil War in the east, so volunteer associations were set up all over the west, in Denver de facto martial law applied . Beckwourth was obliged by Colonel John M. Chivington , the commanding officer of the troops, to make himself available again as a scout despite his old age of well over sixty years. Beckwourth involuntarily led the poorly trained and undisciplined troops on November 29, 1864 to a village of Cheyenne and Arapaho that was already in hibernation . The Sand Creek Massacre that followed was one of the cruelest war crimes of the Indian Wars and sparked a detailed investigation by the US Department of War .

The Cheyenne announced Beckwourth's friendship in January 1865 because of his involvement in the massacre, so that he could no longer trade with them. That year and the following winter he tried again as a trapper. When his group of trappers was attacked by Blackfoot in late winter, he was able to save his life, but lost all equipment and almost all of the season's skins.

In the summer of 1866, the army hired him again as a scout, first at Fort Laramie , then on the Bozeman Trail at Fort Phil Kearny , Wyoming. Here he met Jim Bridger again, who worked with him. On September 1, he advanced to an outpost in the Crow area, and in late October he visited a village of his former people, where he collapsed with a nosebleed. He died a few days later on October 29, 1866.

Meaning of Beckwourth and his memoirs

Beckwourth's role and the value of his book have been controversial. Beckwourth's book was published by Harper & Brothers in New York and London in 1856, and was featured extensively in Harper's Magazine . A French translation appeared in Paris in 1860. In 1892 shortened and distorting reprints appeared again together in New York and London. Despite its widespread use, chroniclers of the Wild West refused to take Beckwourth's memories seriously. Francis Parkman knew Beckwourth from the campfire stories he had spread in his 1849 book about the California and Oregon Trail . At that time he wrote of Beckwourth that he was “a ruffian of the first order, bloodthirsty and false, without honor or honesty; at least that is the character he shows on the prairie. In this case, however, the usual rules of character description fail, because although he may kill a man in his sleep, he also performs the most daring acts of desperation. ”Hiram M. Chittenden's 1902 standard work on the fur trade, which is still authoritative today, comes to little friendlier judgment. Beckwourth is for him a "considerable twisting of the truth" and he writes about his book: "The whole work is interspersed with fables and probably does not contain a single statement that is correctly stated." On the other hand, he considers the book to be "helpful in the Review of statements of others. "

In the years after the First World War, American historians became interested in their own history and the first well-founded historical works about the Wild West appeared. Beckwourth got off better here; Cecil Alder stated that Beckwourth's account was accurate wherever he could check Beckwourth's account against other reports, with the exception of exaggerating his own heroic deeds. Harrison Clifford Dale, after examining the first part of the book, came to the conclusion that Beckwourth was mutilating data and numbers, as it would be excusable for a memory report from a fulfilled life thirty years later. He also interchanged the sequence of some events for the same reason and inserted freely invented dramatic portrayals that illuminate the heroism of James Beckwourth in a noble way. In essence, however, Dale accepted the memories as reliable and had no qualms about basing his account of William Henry Ashley on Beckwourth.

The author of the most detailed biography of Beckwourth, Elinor Wilson, refers repeatedly to the great trust that his business partners placed in Beckwourth. As a fur trader and later as a hotelier, innkeeper and store keeper , he handled the large assets of his clients and partners. Documents received from the fur trading companies show his correctness in the accounts and the above-average payment he received for them. But because of his joy in telling stories around the campfire and his cocky memories, stamped as gaudy liar (grotesque liar), it became a stereotype for many authors about the Wild West to use Beckwourth in a supporting role for the comic relief and not to portray him as an independent person.

Bernard DeVoto, himself a chronicler of the Wild West and Beckwourth's commentator in the reprint of the book in 1931, comes to the conclusion that Beckwourth “is completely unreliable in three things: numbers, love stories and one's own meaning.” He classifies Beckwourth's book as neither a work of history Seal a. "It belongs to a nobler genre: it is mythology". In the early days of the West, when heading out into the wilderness, “Odysseus Smith and Siegfried Carson and their second Fitzpatrick came to life for a few years”. And with the advance of civilization, they themselves were relegated to the realm of fables. "When the columns of wagons pulled along the paved roads, there were no more traces of the demigods who had opened these roads". Beckwourth is one of those mythical figures for him. But DeVoto goes even further in his defense of Beckwourth: "If historiography has rejected the book as romantic poetry, it remains for literary scholarship to recognize it as the best social history of the Wild West." And finally: "Here, on these pages, he lives mountain man . This account of him and his daily hardships, murders and casual violence is very, very true. "

It is controversial to what extent Beckwourth or his editor Bonner refer to the experiences of another black trapper when describing the time with the Crow. Edward Rose was already starting in 1811 for the American Fur Company of John Jacob Astor had worked and lived for several years before Beckwourth as a respected warrior in the Crow. Some of the adventures Beckwourth reports from his time as chief can also be found in Rose's biography. Tragically, Beckwourth almost witnessed Edward Rose's death in a Blackfoot raid near Fort Cass at the mouth of the Bighorn River and reported that his crow avenged his colleague's death.

Bonner's influence on the book is difficult to assess. What is certain is that he is responsible for ensuring that non-English names are written phonetically throughout. Beckwourth spoke perfect French, good Spanish, and several Native American languages. Bonner noted the foreign-language names as he heard them: The French-born merchant Ceran St. Vrain becomes Saverine , Etienne Provost becomes Provo . DeVoto is discussing whether Bonner himself has exaggerated Beckwourth's exaggerations in warlike adventures and love stories.

Beckwourth's life exemplarily shows the upheaval as civilization advances to the west of the North American continent. Towards the end of his life, in Denver, Beckwourth was tried and acquitted twice. Once he had to justify himself for the death of a black bully whom he had shot in self-defense, the other time it was about a settlement. Both matters could have been settled with fists or knives thirty, twenty or ten years earlier, but those days were over and in a recently founded gold rush settlement like Denver, the law ruled in the early 1860s.

Beckwourth's memories are untypical in other respects. Several times he depicts the destructive effect of alcohol on the Indians. It was the constant practice of almost all fur traders, despite various bans by the US federal government , to give out heavily diluted brandy as payment for fur at the beginning of a trade meeting . A pint (just under ½ liter) of this stretched alcohol was worth a buffalo skin in the 1830s. 40 gallons of under $ 20 worth of spirits could be diluted to produce around 1,600 pints and 1,600 buffalo hides for about $ 8,000. Beckwourth addresses this exploitation and mentions in particular that the Indian women do the work of tanning and drying the skins, while it is the men who drink the proceeds, and the Indian women with their children “in front of the men, fathers and brothers Hide the woods that they love when they don't have whiskey and abuse and kill when they have it. ”Verbatim he reproduces a speech given by a Cheyenne named Porcupine Bear on the consequences of alcohol abuse.

Beckwourth in civil clothing - illustration of the first edition

Beckwourth as a role model for African Americans

Beckwourth does not appear as black in his memoirs. He himself does not mention his ancestry and, according to some biographers, would have been angry if he had been referred to as anything other than white. On the contrary, the book contains a clearly racist passage in which he insults a mulatto who is said to have incited the Crow to attack whites as a "black, curly-headed villain" and threatens death. Elsewhere he disregards the death of a black man in Florida with scornful words. He saw himself as a gentleman from Virginia and that is how he was perceived towards the end of his life in Denver. He named his wife in Denver to Lady Beckwourth , and the associated claim to descent from English nobility was recognized in society. The editor of the Rocky Mountain News was friends with him and called him the old hero and a polished gentleman .

After his book was published, Beckwourth fell victim to severe racial hostility from reviewers and chroniclers of the Wild West. Francis Parkman calls him "a bastard of French, American and Negro blood". A former captain of the Kansas Volunteers in the Mexican-American War, Charles M. Christy, brought together further rumors about Beckwourth in his memoirs under the chapter heading "Nigger Jim": He was the son of the French-born fur merchant Chouteaux from St. Louis and one of his Been slaves, sold to a pilot on the Mississippi River named Beckwourth, sold by him to a fur trader who took him to the mountains. The stressed ancestry as black and the claims about French blood served to make him contemptible, since the Americans had taken over the fur trade from the French pioneers in the first third of the 19th century and largely driven them out of business.

Beckwourth was made further accusations: for example, when he briefly returned to the Crow in 1837, he introduced smallpox to the Blackfoot and was responsible for the decimation of all plains Indians in the following years. Joseph Meek, then a trapper for the Rocky Mountain Fur Company rivaling Beckwourth and later a politician in the Oregon Territory , reported that Jim Bridger had accused Beckwourth of bringing infected items from St. Louis and handing them over to a Blackfoot Indian. Chittenden comes to a different conclusion in his standard work. Afterwards, the American Fur Company, as the operator of a ship, failed to quarantine all passengers after a suspicion of smallpox arose on board. In particular, there was a Blackfoot on board who could travel directly to his people without hindrance. Chittenden attributes the epidemic to the ship that left St. Louis on April 17, 1837, while Beckwourth claims to have returned on horseback by the most direct route to the Crow. Frederick S. Dellenbaugh explained the criticism of Beckwourth in 1914 with the fact that as a black he had a disadvantage "especially with authors from slave-holding states", who therefore could not value him highly.

After the Second World War, Beckwourth, the “black fur trader”, was rediscovered as a leading figure by historians of the black movement. In 1954, the Negro History Bulletin stated, "Because of his long association with the fur industry, [Beckwourth] must be counted among the most famous hunters and traders." Between 1965 and 1972, four editions of Beckwourth's book appeared, one of them greatly abridged. The so far most extensive biography of Beckwourth by Elinor Wilson from 1972 bears the subtitle "Black Mountain Man, War Chief of the Crows" and thus places his ancestry next to or even before his achievements. In 1994 Beckwourth was selected by the United States Postal Service and included in a 20-part special stamp series entitled Legends of the West . He is the only western man of black descent on the series.

In the 21st century, Beckwourth is portrayed in California school books as a trail blazer (trailblazer) for settlement and his role in the settlement of the West is discussed in university courses. His life is also taken up by authors of books for children and young people. The first youth book about Beckwourth was published in 1966, another in 1992 and two biographies in 2006 in a youth book series, where he appears as a representative of the Afro-American pioneers.

The life of James P. Beckwourth is the model for the 1963 historical novel Follow the Free Wind (German as Frei wie der Wind , 1965, translated by Tony Westermayr) by the American writer and screenwriter Leigh Brackett and the novel The Medicine Calf by 1981 Bill Hotchkiss.

Honors

After James P. Beckwourth are named:

• the Beckwourth Pass in California's Sierra Nevada
• the Beckwourth Trail , the road created by Beckwourth over the pass, today partially preserved as a state road, partially as a gravel road
• the place Beckwourth in the Sierra Valley, near the pass, emerged from Beckwourth's ranch, hotel and trading post
• the little Jim Beckwourth Museum in Beckwourth
• the Beckwourth Peak , a 2,200 m high mountain southwest of the village
• Beckwourth Lake , a small lake in southern Montana in the Yellowstone River basin
• the former annual Beckwourth Frontier Days Living History Festival in Marysville
• the Beckwourth Riverfront Park , a city park on the Feather River in Marysville
• the collection of records relating to his life and time in the Beckwourth Collection of the Clark Library at Brigham Young University in Salt Lake City

Beckwourth's image was printed on an American 29 ¢ postage stamp from the Legends of the West series in 1994 .

literature

• Thomas D. Bonner (Ed.): The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth . Harper and Brothers, New York 1856 in Google Book search
• Thomas D. Bonner (Ed.): The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth . Edited, with an Introduction by Bernard DeVoto, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1931. (Reprinted from the edition of Harper and Brothers, New York, 1856)
• Elinor Wilson: Jim Beckwourth - Black Mountain Man, War Chief of the Crows . University of Oklahoma Press, Norman and London, 1972, ISBN 0-8061-1555-6 .
• Harold W. Felton: Jim Beckwourth - Negro mountain man . Dodd, Mead, New York 1966 (children's book)
• Sean Dolan: James Beckwourth . Chelsea House, New York 1992, ISBN 0-7910-1120-8 (youth book)
• Susan R. Gregson: James Beckwourth - mountaineer, scout, and pioneer . Compass Point Books, Minneapolis 2006, ISBN 0-7565-1000-7 (youth book)
• Ann S. Manheimer: James Beckwourth - legendary mountain man . Twenty-First Century Books, Minneapolis 2006, ISBN 1-57505-892-8 (youth book)
• W. Sherman Savage: James Beckwourth - Negro Fur Trader . In: Negro History Bulletin . Washington DC, Volume 17, Issue 6 (March 1954), pp. 123 ff.
• Kenneth Wiggins Porter: On Jim Beckwourth . In: The Journal of Ethnic Studies . Bellingham, Washington, Volume 1, Issue 3 (Fall 1973), pp. 78ff.
• Richard M. Merelman: Black History and Cultural Empowerment: A Case Study . In: American Journal of Education . Volume 101, Number 4 (August 1993), pp. 331-358.
• Mary J. Licktig: African American scientists, explorers, and innovators: Resources for elementary and secondary classrooms . In: Journal of African American Studies . Springer, New York, Volume 4, Number 4 (March 2000), ISSN  1081-1753 , doi : 10.1007 / s12111-000-1020-9
• Leigh Brackett: Follow the Free Wind . Doubleday, Garden City, NY 1963 (German as Frei wie der Wind . Goldmann, Munich 1965, translated by Tony Westermayr)
• Bill Hotchkiss: The Medicine Calf . Norton, New York 1981, ISBN 0-393-01389-8 .

Web links

Commons : James Beckwourth  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

• beckwourth.org: Life and Time of James Beckwourth

Evidence

1. ↑ Wilson, p. 30 f.
2. ↑ Baronet Beckwith, of Aldborogh
3. ↑ According to Frederick County's tax records from 1799 with 215 acres (87 hectares), ten slaves and three horses, quoted in Wilson, p. 20.
4. ^ Wilson, p. 14.
5. ↑ From the tax files, quoted from Wilson, p. 18.
6. ↑ Beckwourth 1856, p. 14.
7. ^ Harrison C. Dale: The Explorations of William H. Ashley and Jedediah Smith, 1822-1829. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1991 (reprinted from 1941 edition), ISBN 0-8032-6591-3 , footnote on p. 112.
8. ↑ Dee Brown : The sun rose in the west (original title: The Westerners) , Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1974, ISBN 3-455-00723-6 , p. 61.
9. ↑ DeVoto in Beckwourth 1931, p. Xxiv
10. ^ Leslie A. White: Lewis H. Morgan's Western Field Trips. In: American Anthropologist , New Series, Vol. 53, No. 1 (Jan. - Mar., 1951), pp. 11–18, here p. 15, ( online at JStor )
11. ↑ Beckwourth 1856, p. 124.
12. ^ Wilson, p. 46.
13. ↑ Hiram Martin Chittenden: The American Fur Trade of the Far West. Francis P. Harper, New York, 1902, unmodified reprint of the 2nd revised edition from 1936 by Augustus M. Kelley, Fairfield, New Jersey, 1979, ISBN 0-678-01035-8 , p. 62.
14. ↑ Beckwourth 1856, p. 371.
15. ^ Wilson, p. 73.
16. ↑ Wilson, pp. 86-87.
17. ↑ Josiah Gregg: Commerce of the Prairies - or The journal of a Santa Fè trader - during eight expeditions across the great western prairies, and a residence of nearly nine years in northern Mexico. HG Langley, New York 1844, Volume 2, Chapter 9 (also online: Commerce of the Prairies )
18. ↑ Beckwourth 1856, p. 474.
19. ^ Wilson, p. 9.
20. ↑ Illustrated History of Plumas, Lassen and Sierra Counties , San Francisco, 1882, p. 208 (online: Illustrated History )
21. ^ Wilson, p. 172.
22. ^ Wilson, p. 171.
23. ^ Francis Parkman: The California and Oregon Trail - being sketches of prairie and Rocky Mountain life. New York, Putnam Publishing, 1849, Ch. X (online: California and Oregon Trail )
24. ↑ Hiram Martin Chittenden: The American Fur Trade of the Far West. Francis P. Harper, New York, 1902, quoted from: DeVoto in Beckwourth 1931, p. Xx
25. ↑ Cecil J. Alder: James Bridger. Salt Lake City, 1925, quoted from DeVoto in Beckwourth 1931, p. Xxii
26. ^ Harrison C. Dale: The Explorations of William H. Ashley and Jedediah Smith, 1822-1829. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1991 (reprint of 1941 edition), ISBN 0-8032-6591-3 , footnote p. 137, footnote p. 155, and note on Beckwourth's book, p. 321.
27. ^ Wilson, p. 172.
28. ^ Wilson, p. 5.
29. ↑ DeVoto in Beckwourth 1931, pp. Xxiii
30. ↑ DeVoto in Beckwourth 1931, pp. Xxvii
31. ↑ DeVoto in Beckwourth 1931, p. Xxxi
32. ↑ DeVoto in Beckwourth 1931, p. Xxv
33. ^ Wilson, p. 187.
34. ↑ DeVoto in Beckwourth 1931, pp. Xxiv f.
35. ↑ DeVoto in Beckwourth 1931, p. Xxxviii
36. ↑ Beckwourth 1856, p. 433, p. 444.
37. ↑ Beckwourth 1856, p. 459 ff.
38. ↑ Porter, p. 80.
39. ↑ Beckwourth 1856, p. 249.
40. ↑ Beckwourth 1856, p. 411.
41. ^ Wilson, p. 168.
42. ↑ Porter, p. 81.
43. ^ Francis Parkman: The California and Oregon Trail - being sketches of prairie and Rocky Mountain life. New York, Putnam Publishing, 1849, Ch. X (online: California and Oregon Trail )
44. ^ Wilson, p. 7.
45. ^ Wilson, p. 80.
46. ^ Wilson, p. 82.
47. ↑ Frederick S. Dellenbaugh: Frémont and '49 , New York, London, GP Putnam's sons, 1914, p. 118, quoted from Wilson, p. 8.
48. ↑ Savage, p. 124.
49. ^ Missouri State University: Missouri History ( July 6, 2011 memento in the Internet Archive )

This article was added to the list of excellent articles on January 3, 2008 in this version .