The Conquest: The Story of a Negro PioneerMicheaux, Oscar
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The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer
Micheaux, Oscar
African American pioneers -- Fiction; Autobiographical fiction; South Dakota -- Fiction; Western stories
Perhaps I should not have become so set against stories whose heroes
invariably became multi-millionaires, had it not been for the fact that
many of the younger members of my race, with whom I had made
acquaintance in my trips to Chicago and other parts of the country,
always appeared to intimate in their conversation, that a person should
have riches thrust upon them if they sacrificed all their "good times,"
as they termed it, to go out west. Of course the easterner, in most
stories, conquers and becomes rich, that is, after so much sacrifice.
The truth is, in real life only about one in ten of the eastern people
make good at ranching or homesteading, and that one is usually well
supplied with capital in the beginning, though of course there are
exceptions. Colored people are much unlike the people of other races.
For instance, all around me in my home in Dakota were foreigners of
practically all nations, except Italians and Jews, among them being
Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, Assyrians from Jerusalem, many Austrians,
some Hungarians, and lots of Germans and Irish, these last being mostly
American born, and also many Russians. The greater part of these people
are good farmers and were growing prosperous on the Little Crow, and
seeing this, I worked the harder to keep abreast of them, if not a
little ahead. This was my fifth year and still there had not been a
colored person on my land. Many more settlers had some and Tipp county
was filling up, but still no colored people. My white neighbors had many
visitors from their old homes and but few but had visitors at some time
to see them and see what they were doing.
During my visit to Kansas the spring previous, I had found many
prosperous colored families, most of whom had settled in Kansas in the
seventies and eighties and were mostly ex-slaves, but were not like the
people of southern Illinois, contented and happy to eke a living from
the farm they pretended to cultivate, but made their farms pay by
careful methods. The farms they owned had from a hundred and sixty
acres to six hundred and forty acres, and one colored man there at that
time owned eleven hundred acres with twelve thousand dollars in the
bank.
Wherever I had been, however, I had always found a certain class in
large and small towns alike whose object in life was obviously nothing,
but who dressed up and aped the white people.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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