Black Pioneers: Images of the Black Experience on the North American Frontier

ISBN-10: 0874805465
ISBN-13: 9780874805468
Series: Black Pioneers
Pages: 224
Language: English
Published: 1997
Publisher: University of Utah Press
Author: John W. Ravage

Description

John Ravage has assembled a phenomenal archive of over 200 never-before-published photographs that depict the full range of African-American experience in the West. Beginning with the earliest available photographs from the mid-1800s, the collection of images in Black Pioneers reconstructs our understanding of the history and contributions of African-Americans to westward expansion. Black Pioneers offers graphic evidence that blacks did not play a limited role in the settlement of the West; instead, their work and experiences as politicians, soldiers, doctors, ranchers, deputies, nannies, midwives, cowboys, and homesteaders were crucial to the communities in which they lived. In this book, images of gamblers and outlaws, prospectors and miners, ship captains and rodeo stars further challenge our stereotypes of the West's population. It contains one of the only five known images of Mary Fields, a bar-owner, post-mistress, and shotgun-rider for Wells-Fargo Express and provides witness to the feats of Rolf Logan, cowboy and California homesteader.