The Erosion of the Racial Frontier: Settler Colonialism and the History
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THE EROSION OF THE RACIAL FRONTIER: SETTLER COLONIALISM AND THE HISTORY OF BLACK MONTANA, 1880-1930 by Anthony William Wood A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in History MONTANA STATE UNIVERSITY Bozeman, Montana April 2018 ©COPYRIGHT by Anthony William Wood 2018 All Rights Reserved ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the history faculty at Carroll College and Dr. Swarthout who pushed history majors such as myself to work as interns with the Montana State Historic Preservation Office in Helena, Montana. It was at SHPO that I was so fortunate to work for Kate Hampton, who had already worked tirelessly keeping the Montana’s African American Heritage Places Project alive for over a decade, and who continued to lead and guide me while I researched and wrote for the project for three years. Classes I took at MSU, especially Dr. Mark Fiege’s seminar on the American West, offered strikingly new approaches that opened up different methods as well as mountains of scholarship that would profoundly inform how I thought about race and the American West. I am further indebted to my wonderful committee members, Drs. Mary Murphey, Amanda Hendrix- Komoto, Billy Smith, and my chair, Mark Fiege for all their time spent talking with me about sections of my thesis, different approaches I might try, or even just listening as I tried to organize my ideas. I am also thankful and sorry to my office-mates Amanda Hardin and Jen Dunn who were unlucky enough to work within ear-shot. I would also like to thank my parents for their support throughout my life, and specifically my Dad for reading so much of my work and always urging me to put in the effort to be a better writer. Finally I would like to thank my wife Steffany, who has been a part of this work since we first met while creating a map of the black community in Helena when I was still a college intern working on Montana’s African American Heritage Places Project. Her patience, support, and expertise is the only reason I am able to succeed. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: COLONIAL EROSION ......................................................................1 1. THE INVISIBLE MIGRATION: BLACK SETTLERS TO MONTANA, 1880-1917 ......................................................................................................................25 2. THE WASHINGTONIAN WEST: SOCIAL IDEOLOGY AND THE AND THE POLITICS OF RACE IN MONTANA .......................................................51 Photo Gallery One..........................................................................................................82 3. THINKING WITH MAGPIES: THE BLACK WILDERNESS EXPERIENCE AND THE LOGIC OF SETTLEMENT IN MONTANA’S CONSERVATION MOVEMENT .......................................................89 Photo Gallery Two .......................................................................................................121 4. LEGISLATING COLONIAL EROSION: SEXUALITY, THE FAMILY, AND ANTI-MISCEGENATION LAW IN MONTANA ..........................127 5. HISTORY AMONG THE SEDIMENTS: ON THE ENTANGLEMENTS OF RACE AND REGION .......................................................155 EPILOGUE: BLACK MONTANA’S CRITIQUE OF SETTLER COLONIALISM ............................................................................................180 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................189 APPENDICES .................................................................................................................206 APPENDIX A: Population and Census Data.......................................................207 APPENDIX B: Homestead Research ..................................................................213 iv LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1.1. African American Men aboard Steamboat .....................................................82 1.2. African American Settlers near Ravalli and St. Ignatius ................................82 1.3. 25th Infantry Fort Shaw ...................................................................................83 1.4. 10th Cavalry Fort Custer ..................................................................................83 1.5. William C. Irvin, Policeman, Helena 1890 .....................................................84 1.6. African American Waiters, MT Legislature Dinner, 1903 .............................85 1.7. African American Chauffeur, Helena 1915 ....................................................85 1.8. African American Student, Helena, 1910 .......................................................86 1.9. Howard-Crump House, Helena, 1895 .............................................................86 1.10. Masthead, The New Age, 1902 ......................................................................87 1.11 Masthead, The Montana Plaindealer, 1910 ...................................................87 1.12. Zanzibar Excerpt, 1907 .................................................................................88 2.1. “York” by Charles Russell ............................................................................121 2.2. 10th Cavalry in Glacier National Park ...........................................................121 2.3. 25th Infantry Bicycle Corps in Yellowstone .................................................122 2.4. 25th Infantry Bicycle Corps atop Mammoth Hot Springs .............................122 2.5. 9th Cavalry camp near Jackson Lake, WY ....................................................123 2.6. 9th Cavalry pictured with “Beaver Dick” Leigh, 1896 ..................................123 2.7. African American Men with Instruments, Yellowstone, 1901 .....................124 2.8. African American Men, Yellowstone, 1901 .................................................124 v LIST OF FIGURES CONTINUED Figure Page 2.9. Pleasant Hour Club Picnic ............................................................................125 2.10 African American Cowboy, Forsyth, MT ....................................................125 2.11. African American Men and Women Harvesting Ice ..................................126 vi ABSTRACT From 1880-1910, Montana was home to one of the most vibrant and diverse African American communities in the Rocky Mountain West. By the onset of World War II, however, the black population had fallen by over fifty percent, and Montana was well on its way to being the least black state in the US by the twenty-first century. In The Erosion of the Racial Frontier, I argue that scholars of African American studies and the American West must consider the sedimented afterlife of US settler colonialism if those fields are to articulate a distinctly western narrative of African American history. My approach draws on colonial and settler colonial theories to examine the history of African Americans in Montana from 1880-1930. As a non-indigenous, non-white, community of color—or what Lorenzo Veracini would call ‘subaltern exogenous others’—black westerners fall into an uncertain space in settler colonial theory. As an ongoing structure, settler colonialism continues after the violent appropriation of Indigenous lands appears to culminate. The thesis of The Erosion of the Racial Frontier is two-fold: The logic of settlement together with the logic of anti-blackness created distinctly western categories of racial exclusion that is evident in the archive of black Montana. This western, colonial racism acted as an erosive force across the state, targeting the stability and place identity of western black communities. Moreover, the society that developed in tandem with colonial erosion necessarily continues to live with the sedimented afterlife of settler colonialism. As such, the history of Black Montana can be understood as individual and collective experiences of thousands of black Montanans struggling against and subverting the settler colonial project in western North America. 1 INTRODUCTION COLONIAL EROSION: UNEARTHING AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY IN THE SETTLER COLONIAL WEST In summer 2015, while working as a research historian for the Montana State Historical Society’s African American Heritage Places Project, I helped create a large, digital map of Helena, Montana.1 The State Historic Preservation Office’s GIS specialist skillfully stitched together over forty individual Sanborn Fire Insurance sheets, creating a mosaic of the town as it existed in 1892.2 Sanborn Company cartographers carefully denoted the shape, materials, and usage of buildings to meticulous scale in thousands of cities across the United States. For the project’s purposes, the new map showed over one hundred buildings and houses that were owned or rented by Helena’s African American community between 1880 and 1930. Information from the 1910 and 1930 censuses, over thirty years of Polk City Directories, and a wealth of local knowledge helped map one of the largest and most vibrant black communities in Montana. The 1892 map layer was then georectified to a current satellite image, illustrating what recent technology can contribute to the study of a sense of place. 1 As a project historian with the Montana State Historic Preservation Office, my research entailed compiling, coding, and analyzing census records, addresses, places of employment, birth and marriage certificates, city directories, and oral histories of black Montanans from 1890-1930. In researching twelve communities, dozens of businesses, nearly one hundred families, and over a thousand individuals