The Overlooked Black American Pioneers of the Western frontier

Recommendable!

"... For African [???] Americans, the frontier could be a place of hardship, but it also offered opportunity—a chance to construct new identities and exercise personal agency.

Consider the stories of three enslaved men who headed west to acquire skills as trappers, traders, and navigators during the first half of the nineteenth century. ...

All three men bore firearms during a time when Louisiana Purchase Territory codes generally forbade enslaved people from possessing guns or other weapons. While crossing the continent with the Corps of Discovery from 1804 to 1806, York expertly hunted bison and geese using his own rifle. Meriwether Lewis recorded that the firearm “belonged to Capt. Clark’s black man,” providing evidence that Clark did not merely loan him the weapon. ..."

The West’s Overlooked Black Pioneers — The Coolidge Review