That famous ad William Ashley in Saint Louie used to fish for recruits for his Rocky Mountain Fur Trade brought in men, even young men, who weren't choir boys or ever would be. Hard as it is to believe in 1824, Ashley was an equal opportunity employer. How can we know that? Because we know one of his recruits, at least, was African-American.
James Beckwourth's father, using an old English family title, went by name of Sir Jennings Beckwith. Sir Jennings coupled with one of his slaves who gave birth to James Beckwourth, a multi-racial kid who was treated by his father, the old sources say, like a son, not a slave--which is to say educated and, in general, pampered.
Okay, but then how on earth did a Black man fare with a cast of mountain men, rough-an- tough hooligans who held less-than-charming prejudices? James the Black man didn't get drummed out of the corps.
Why not? Sir Jennings' son James carried along a deed of emancipation that declared his freedom. He couldn't be cashed in like some runaway. So here's a word that's fallen out of use--manumission. One word, manumission, a word used to describe how freed slaves were granted, by their owners, their freedom. Once manumitted, we might say, James Beckwourth was free as a bird.
And he flew--did he ever. Once freed from his apprenticeship to an ornery St. Louis blacksmith, Beckwourth read the ad and signed up to be one of Ashley's rugged wilderness crew, where he spent most of the next decade as one of the original mountain men, taking a wife or two or three from the Crows, where he became the chief's adopted son and lived, quite comfortably in fact, while fighting the Crow's traditional enemies, the Blackfeet.
There's oh-so-much more. He left the Crow people and became a commodities trader at places like Bent's Fort, Sante Fe, and Taos, and in 1842 put up his own business at a lonesome place that would someday be named Pueblo, Colorado.
During the Gold Rush era, he went to the bank with his what he knew about the untraveled west, leading wild-eyed fortune seekers to the places they thought to make a fortune.
And everywhere he went he fought Indians--Seminoles in Florda, renegade bands in California, and the Cheyenne and Arapaho back on the plains. When finally he grew old, he met a man named Thomas Bonner at Beckwourth's own country hotel. Bonner listened to Jim Beckwouth tales and wrote them down into a book, The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth: Mountaineer, Scout and Pioneer, and Chief of the Crow Nation of Indians (1856).
Beckwourth didn't have to lie about the happenings in his life, but he did--or so say some historians. Sometimes it's hard to measure tall tales.
Late in life, he went back to the Crow, where he'd come son of the chief way back in the ancient past. No one knows how he died, or at least no one's talking about it. A rumor claims one of his ex-wives found a way to get back at him.
Not nice, but it sort of fits, don't you think?
Was he here? Had to be. He was, in short, almost everywhere else.
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