SOURCE: "Oscar Micheaux: A Black Pioneer," in South Dakota Review, Vol. 11, No. 4, Winter, 1973-74, pp. 62-9.

[In the following essay, Hebert discusses Micheaux's novels as socio-historical artifacts that offer unique glimpses of South Dakotan life during the times in which the works were written.]

During the spring of 1905, a unique homesteader appeared in Gregory County, South Dakota who became the object of much attention and gossip, for as the homesteader himself claimed, he, Oscar Micheaux, "was the only colored man engaged in agriculture … from Megory [Gregory] to Omaha, a distance of three hundred miles." Today, attention is again being directed toward Micheaux, not only because he was a black homesteader, but because he recorded his South Dakota experiences in two novels, The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer published in 1913 and The Homesteader published in 1917.

Most of what is known about Micheaux's background and his experiences in Gregory County exists in these two novels and the memories of those Gregory County pioneers who knew him. According to both sources, Micheaux spent his childhood about forty miles from Cairo, Illinois, but being more interested in people than in his father's small farm, he began working in the cities of Illinois, at one point as a shoe-shine boy.

Micheaux left Illinois when about eighteen and became a Pullman porter, a fact which later amused his homesteading neighbors. As one of these neighbors recalls, "You can't find a better metaphor than a Pullman porter pushing a plow. He must have gone through the agonies of hell. However, he must have got the hang of it because he used eight horses pulling a binder with a seeder on behind. Harvesting and seeding at the same time was an innovation all his own.

However little Micheaux's experiences equipped him for farming they did increase his awareness of the opportunities available to black people, for while he was a porter, he heard rumors that the eastern part of the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota was to be opened for settlement. To Micheaux, the prospects here looked inviting because as he says [in The Conquest], "I concluded on one thing, and that was, if one whose capital was under eight or ten thousand dollars, desired to own a farm in the great central west, he must go where the land was new or raw and undeveloped. He must begin with the beginning and develop with the development of the country." And so, while he missed the actual opening of Gregory County in the spring of 1904, he did purchase a relinquishment southeast of Gregory that fall.

The location of this particular relinquishment, however, has brought into question Micheaux's real motives regarding the purchase. In The Conquest and The Homesteader, Micheaux claims that he was not only sincerely interested in farming, but that he was also very successful in it. He comments [in the former], "When I broke out one hundred and twenty acres with such an outfit as I had, as against many other real fanners who had not broken over forty acres, with good horses and their knowledge of breaking prairie, .… I began to be regarded in a different light.… I was not called a free-go-easy coon, but a genuine booster for Calias [Dallas] and the Little Crow [Rosebud]." On the other hand, one of the pioneers who knew him says that Micheaux purchased this particular piece of land for speculative purposes, basing his purchase on rumors that the railroad would soon pass through Dallas, a small town in a section adjoining Micheaux's land. "Micheaux's game was trying to outfox the railroad, and his farming efforts merely a front." (The railroad by 1904 had gone as far west as Bonesteel, thirty miles east of Micheaux's claim and was in the process of extending farther west.) "The railroad no doubt put out decoy plans and survey to throw the land speculators a curve. From Bonesteel they first said they were going to the northwest and then said to the southwest. After they got everyone touted off, they put her right down the middle. Micheaux got sucked in on the southwest route."

Whatever Micheaux's intentions may have been, the railroad was routed about three miles north of his claim, and he did turn to farming and begin to consider his future as a permanent resident of the area. Of special concern to him were the prospects for obtaining a wife. There were, of course, no young black women in the area, and although Micheaux became very close to a young white girl who was his neighbor, he admits, "when the reality of the situation dawned on me, I became in a way frightened, for I did not by any means want to fall in love with a white girl. I had always disapproved of intermarriage, considering it as being above all things, the very thing that a colored man could not even think of. That we would become desperately in love, however, seemed inevitable." Remembering that he had relatives in Chicago who might be able to help him find a black wife, Micheaux went there several times. Finally, he did meet a young black girl willing to leave the lights of Chicago for a life on the prairie. She was Mildred, the daughter of a minister in one of the leading Negro churches.

While describing his experiences while courting Mildred, Micheaux is very careful in The Conquest to inform his readers that he is cultured, and this often pretentious concern leads him into several digressions relating to his experiences in Chicago. In regard to a play which he and Mildred attend, he offers this criticism. "The next play we attended suited me better as, to my mind, it possessed all that 'Madam X' lacked, and instead of weakness and an unhappy ending, this was one of strength of character, and a happy finale. It was 'The Fourth Estate,' by Joseph Medili Patterson, who served his apprenticeship on the Chicago Tribune."

While Micheaux's attitude as expressed here is certainly unimportant in terms of the plot of The Conquest, it does reveal a certain aspect of his character, an aspect which was most disagreeable to his future father-in-law. Nevertheless, despite his dislike for Micheaux, the minister did permit the couple to marry and return to South Dakota.

During the time that Micheaux was in Chicago, progress was continuing on the frontier. The town of Dallas, having been ignored by the railroad, was literally moved piece by piece to five miles west of Gregory. In this position, it for a time realized its desire of being the western terminus, but this glory was short-lived as in 1908, Tripp County was opened for settlement, and the railroad again moved westward.

Micheaux again was not far behind. Upon his return from Chicago, he made arrangements for his wife to establish a claim in Tripp County. Since his farm was in Gregory County and she was required by terms of her claim to establish residency there in Tripp County, the couple was separated much of the time. Mildred, of course, began writing letters to her family in Chicago, and it was not long before the minister began interfering in his daughter's marriage. As previously mentioned, the minister and Micheaux disagreed on many subjects, but they primarily fought over Micheaux's belief [expressed in The Forged Note] that "the Negro did not put forth the effort he could and should, from an industrial point-of-view, for his ultimate betterment." The minister, accustomed to being a dominant figure undoubtedly felt threatened because he could not exercise control over the ideas and actions of his adventurous son-in-law. Within a year or two after his daughter's marriage, the minister went to South Dakota, coerced Mildred into signing her husband's name on a check, then cashed it, and took her back to Chicago.

Despite his efforts, Micheaux could not get Mildred to return to South Dakota, and it was during the next few years while he was alone on the homestead that Micheaux began writing The Conquest, a description of the events of his life up to that time. Shortly after, he wrote The Forged Note which deals with Southern blacks, but then again returned to his South Dakota theme in The Homesteader.

At this point, knowledge of Micheaux as an author and as a homesteader becomes very vague. Other pioneers in the area seem only to agree that "he had borrowed money everywhere he could and skipped out without a trace owing a lot of people." In fact, it was not until nearly thirty years later that the name of Oscar Micheaux drew the attention of his former neighbors, and then it was not merely attention, but surprise. In 1940, a local newspaper noted that at a meeting in Chicago, Ernest Jackson, who had been active in founding Dallas, and later Winner, South Dakota, reported the following for the interest of those who may have remembered Oscar Micheaux. "(He) told about the present abode and prosperity of Mr. Micheaux. He stated that he had risen high in the movie producing industry, and that two-thirds of the movie houses in the Negro district of Chicago continuously show 'Oscar Micheaux Productions.' He lives in New York and drives to Chicago in a 16-cylinder car with a white chauffeur. He weighs over three hundred pounds" ["Negro Who Homesteaded in Rosebud Now Big Man in U.S. Movie Pictures," Sioux Falls Argus Leader, 4 March 1940].

Micheaux again came to life in a 1970 issue of the New Yorker [18 April] which stated that "God's Step Children, a melodrama filmed in 1938 for black audiences by the black director Oscar Micheaux, who died in 1951, was shown in New York the other day … at the Jewish Museum." According to the article Micheaux directed between twenty and thirty films, which were created to make money and generally involved stereotyped characters. The article gives a very negative review of the movie, but one of Micheaux's leading men is said to have emphatically stated, "I think Micheaux was a genius."

Genius or not in the film industry, Micheaux also continued writing novels; these again were directed primarily to black readers. The Black Yearbook 1947 lists the following three novels: The Wind From Nowhere (1942), The Case of Mrs. Wingate (1944), and The Story of Dorothy Stanfield (1946), and further comments that "Dealing with sensational themes such as Negro-white marriage, the stage type of woman, black Nazis, and the Negro's shortcomings, these novels present as few other works today the attitude, the thinking, the prejudices, and to a certain degree the turn of phrase of the Negro man-in-the-street. Micheaux knows intimately the psychology of the mass-Negro and he exploits it effectively in his novels. But he too suffers from many technical deficiencies. For this and other reasons there has been a tendency among critics to 'dismiss' Oscar Micheaux as a writer."

Whatever evaluations have been made concerning Micheaux's later work, for those persons interested in literature of Midwestern settlement, evaluation should be primarily concerned with his two early novels, The Conquest and The Homesteader. The merit of these two novels may perhaps best be determined by two investigations, the first concerned with their historical validity and the other concerned with their expression of a black man regarding his role as a homesteader.

Although, as earlier mentioned, Micheaux sometimes related quite vaguely his intentions and relationship to the history being made around him, he does give a reason-ably accurate account of the area's development. In The Conquest, he has changed the names of the actual towns and people, but one needs only to read a history of the area to identify the places and people with certainty.

Micheaux is perhaps the most valid and most interesting in describing the development of towns and railroads; the relocation of Dallas, the ensuing battle between the new Dallas and Gregory, the founding and death of Lamro in Tripp County, which gradually moved itself to become a part of the railroad town, Winner, and the confusion and lawlessness which entered these towns whenever there was a land opening.

With regard to people, Micheaux goes into little detail except when speaking of the Nicholson brothers, actually the Jackson brothers, who, through their political connections, greatly influenced the development of Dallas and Winner, and whose names are generally associated with the large and successful Mulehead Ranch. Another interesting historical character whom Micheaux does mention is the "Oklahoma" grafter, Numemaker from Bonesteel, who deceptively and unscrupulously helped Micheaux select his first team. "He finally persuaded me to buy a team of big plugs, one of which was so awkward he looked as though he would fall down if he tried to trot. The other was a powerful four-year-old gelding, that would have never been for sale around Oristown [Bonesteel] if it hadn't been that he had two feet badly wire cut." But as later events show, Micheaux didn't learn much from his dealings with this grafter, for he traded three or four times before he finally got a team that was worth anything.

While Micheaux's perception of the people he dealt with may have been weak, his perception of incidents occur-ring around him was quite vivid, and he relates for his readers some of the more interesting ones such as the prairie fire in Dallas, the death of Jack Sully, and the story of Rattlesnake Jack. The latter of these indicates the way a small incident can be blown up into a headline story. According to an Omaha newspaper, Rattlesnake Jack, who was a woman, killed eighty rattlesnakes in her little shanty in Gregory County. "The Omaha newspaper printed the story illustrated with a picture of a beautiful girl in a leather skirt, riding boots, and cowboy hat, entering a sod house and being greeted by a monstrous snake.… For a few brief weeks or even months, the Gregory area was boasting a character as important as Calamity Jane or Poker Alice" [Gregory Times-Advocate, "Fifty Years in the Rosebud Country of South Dakota," 7 January 1954]. However, as historical records show and Oscar Micheaux notes, while in the article, "she was also credited with having spent the previous winter alone on her claim and rather enjoyed the wintery nights and snow blockade," she actually "had spent most of the previous winter enjoying the comforts of a front room at the Hotel Calias … she had no horse, and as to the eighty rattlesnakes, seventy-nine were myths, existing only in the mind of a prolific feature story writer for the Sunday edition of the great dailies. In fact, she had killed one small rattler with a button."

This perception of actual events was not something Micheaux simply developed on the prairie, but seems to be a quality he had always possessed, and in his novels, he does relate most events with accuracy. In addition, Micheaux was a keen observer of various types of people and his frequent comments on them form a partial picture of his self-expression in the unique role of a black homesteader.

As previously noted, one of Micheaux's main concerns throughout his early novels as well as in his later work is the role of the black man in a predominantly white society. Time and again, Micheaux repeats the idea that while black men are in a bad situation and have some legitimate complaints, they often don't take advantage of opportuni-ties available to them. Through his many experiences as a porter he "learned the greatest of all the failings were not only among the ignorant class [of blacks] but among the educated as well. Although more agreeable to talk to, they lacked that great and mighty principle which characterizes Americans, called 'the initiative'. Colored people are possible in every way that is akin to becoming good citizens, which has been thoroughly proven and is an existing fact. Yet they seem to lack the 'guts' to get into the northwest and 'do things'".

This obvious statement of "See, I am better than most blacks" is quite in keeping with what is known of Micheaux's character, but considering the fact that his later work was directed almost exclusively to black audiences, the following attitude appears somewhat incongruous. "By reading nothing but discussions concerning the race, by all but refusing to accept the success of the white race as an example and by welcoming any racial disturbance as a conclusion that the entire white race is bent in one great effort to hold him—the negro, down, he can not very well feel the thrill of modern progress and is ignorant as to public opinion."

Micheaux also expressed himself in relation to another minority group with which he came into contact, the American Indian. Here his attitudes, whether based on experience or hearsay, are quite narrow. In The Homesteader, he digresses from his main plot to include a chapter on how the Indians shot up the town when a Dallas bartender refused to serve them, and in The Conquest, he mentions that "The Indians were always selling and are yet, what is furnished them by the government, for all they can get. When given the money spends it as quickly as he possibly can, buying fine horses, buggies, whiskey, and what-not. Their only idea being that it is to spend. The Sioux Indians, in my opinion are the wealthiest tribe. They owned at one time the larger part of southern South Dakota and northern Nebraska, and own a lot of it yet. Be it said, however, it is simply because the government will not allow them to sell."

While there is certainly room for argument in many of Micheaux's statements, his novels are none the less valuable, for an informed reader immediately realizes that he is simply one man expressing one point-of-view, from a position that is certainly unique. Taking this into consideration then, there can be little argument concerning the fact that Oscar Micheaux experienced several interesting years as a South Dakota homesteader, and has left us two valuable accounts to add to the literature of settlement in the Midwest.