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  • Exploration, Pioneering, and Native Peoples x
  • Before 1400: The Ancient and Medieval Worlds x
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Article

Dorman, Isaiah  

Ann T. Keene

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

frontiersman and interpreter, was known as “Teat,” or the Wasicun Sapa (Black White Man), among the Sioux of Dakota Territory. Nothing is known of his life before he entered the territory as a young man around 1850. He is thought to have been an escaped slave who fled to the wilderness to avoid capture. Sioux tribal history records his presence in their midst from that date. He became known to white settlers in 1865, by which time he had become fluent in the Sioux dialect. About this time he married a Sioux woman and built a log cabin near Fort Rice, in Dakota Territory, not far from present-day Bismarck, North Dakota. For a while he earned a living cutting wood for the fort and for a trading firm, Durfee and Peck.

In November 1865 Dorman was hired by the U S Army to carry the ...

Article

Du Sable, Jean Baptiste Pointe  

Richard C. Lindberg

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

explorer and merchant, was born in San Marc, Haiti, the son of a slave woman (name unknown) and Dandonneau (first name unknown), scion of a prominent French Canadian family active in the North American fur trade. Surviving historical journals record the name of Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable (Pointe au Sable by some accounts), a Haitian of mixed-race ancestry, as the first permanent settler of Chicago. In her 1856 memoir of frontier life in the emerging Northwest Territory, Juliette Kinzie, the wife of the fur trader John Kinzie makes note of the fact that the first white man who settled here was a Negro Several of the voyageurs and commercial men who regularly traversed the shores of southern Lake Michigan in the last decade of the eighteenth century kept accurate records of their encounters in journals and ledger books One such entry describes du Sable as a ...

Article

Ezra  

Glenn Allen Knoblock

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

Ohio frontier settler and slave, was likely born in Africa and brought to the American colonies by slave traders as a young boy. While details about nearly all of his life are speculative at best, Ezra was purchased at Baltimore, Maryland, by Dr. David McMahan in the years before the American Revolution. When Dr. McMahan decided to travel to the Ohio country to claim land for his own in early 1777 he brought along with him his two Negro slaves Ezra and Sam Eckert 123 Traveling overland from Fort Cumberland on the Braddock Road the three man party crossed the Monongahela River and made their way to Wheeling on the Ohio River Making their way on packhorses loaded with the provisions and supplies needed for homesteading as well as McMahan s medical gear the trip was a long and arduous one While details are lacking there can be ...

Article

Hosier, “Black Harry”  

Sandy Dwayne Martin

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

lay preacher, itinerant minister, early Methodist leader and guide, was born a slave, perhaps in the area of Fayetteville, North Carolina. There have been variations of his last name circulating throughout history: Hoosier, Hossier, and Hoshier in particular. Apparently he was often called “Black Harry” because of his purely African lineage. Little is known about his early life, his parentage or his family, and there is no record of the exact month and day of his death. He may have been enslaved by a Henry (or Harry) Dorset Gough in the Baltimore area.Hosier's tremendous power as a preacher, however, is well documented, beginning around 1780. Hosier preached in the Carolinas, the Middle Colonies and into the New England area. His fame as a circuit preacher emerged alongside several luminaries of early Methodism: Francis Asbury, Freeborn Garretson, Thomas Coke, Jesse Lee, Richard ...

Article

Washington, Harry  

William J. Harris

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

Revolutionary-era runaway slave, British Loyalist, and early settler in Sierra Leone, is believed to have been born in the Senegambia region of Africa. George Washington, then a colonel in the army of the British Empire, purchased Harry in 1763, along with Nan (believed to have been his wife) and four other slaves as a part of Washington's Great Dismal Swamp plan. According to this plan, Washington and five other planters would each provide five slaves to form a workforce to drain sixty square miles of the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia and establish a rice plantation. By 1766 Washington had moved both Harry and Nan to work on his Mount Vernon Plantation in Virginia.

In 1771 Washington sent Harry to work on the construction of a mill approximately three miles from the Mansion House Clearly not content with his lot as a slave Harry made his first ...

Article

York  

James J. Holmberg

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

explorer, slave, and the first African American to cross the North American continent from coast to coast north of Mexico, is believed to have been born in Caroline County, Virginia, the son of an enslaved African American also named York (later called Old York), owned by John Clark, a member of the Virginia gentry and father of the famous George Rogers Clark and William Clark. York's mother is unidentified; it is likely that she, too, was a Clark family slave. A slave named Rose is sometimes listed as York s mother but sources best identify her as his stepmother York is believed to have been assigned while a child to William Clark as his servant and companion Since such relationships were generally between children of about the same age with the slave sometimes a few years younger York may have been about two or ...