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THE FIRST 30 IMIGRANTS ARRIVED IN NICODEMUS
 from Kentucky in July 1877, and 150 more came from Tennessee, Missouri, and Mississippi the following March. They were forerunners to the famous wave of "Exodusters" -black Southerners who migrated en masse to Kansas in 1879, in response to mounting hostility from the white population. Nothing in their past experience had prepared them for life in western Kansas. The flat, windswept high plains, known for blazing summer heat and bitter winter cold, were better suited to growing cactus than corn or wheat. Willianna Hickman, one of the settlers in the second party to arrive, wrote excitedly about navigating across the plains by compass. Arriving in Nicodemus, however, she saw nothing but dugouts-make-shift dwellings. "We landed and struck tents," she recalled. "The scenery was not at all inviting and I began to cry." Despite her initial
dismay, Hickman and most of the other early settlers remained. By 1880, 258 blacks
and 58 whites were living in and around Nicodemus. The farmers supported a
thriving community that was virtually identical to those in other towns
throughout the West, with one exception -the unusual degree to which the black
and white residents intermingled. The whites who chose to live in the
community integrated themselves into the commercial and social life of the
town, supporting local businesses, celebrating holidays, such as West Indian
Emancipation Day, and playing on sports teams. Arthur G.Tallman, the white owner
of the local newspaper, the Nicodemus Western Cyclone, wrote that Nicodemus
"is the most harmonious place on earth....Everybody works for the
interest of the town and all pull together." Nicodemus became an
important symbol of African-American self-governance and economic
enterprise. Yet as early as the 1880s, the town began a steady decline. First, the
weather struck. The winter blizzards of 1885 destroyed 40 percent of the area's
wheat crop; two years later, town leaders failed in their efforts to attract the
Missouri Pacific Railroad. Like hundreds of other towns bypassed by the
railroad, Nicodemus's fate was sealed. Although much of the
African-American West is only now becoming better known, two groups of black
men - cowboys and Buffalo Soldiers - have long represented the black presence
there. Estimates of the numbers of Western black cowboys have often been
exaggerated (U.S.census figures for 1890 show no more than 1,600 black
stock raisers, herders, and drovers for the entire West); nonetheless, these men
worked in every Western state and territory and held every kind of job
associated with the cattle industry. African-American cowboys
epitomized Western freedom. They shared equally the dangers, hardships, and, surprisingly for that era, rates of pay with white
drovers. Men such as Jim Perry, who worked on the three-million-acre XIT ranch in
the Texas Panhandle, and Al Jones, who as trail boss led thousands of steers from
the Texas plains to Kansas railroad towns in the 1880s, became legendary. Charles
Goodnight, a white Texas cattleman, spoke of Bose Ikard, a trusted hand, as
"my detective, banker, and everything else in Colorado, New Mexico and the
other wild country I was in." As the industry began to decline in the early
twentieth century, some black cowboys, such as Bill Pickett of Oklahoma and
George Fletcher of Oregon, made the transition to newly emerging
entertainment, the rodeo. As the "sable arm "of the United States government, Buffalo Soldiers, the 25,000 men who
served between 1866 and 1917 in four infantry and cavalry regiments, confronted
Apache, Comanche, Cheyenne, and Sioux warriors, and on occasion defended Native
Americans from white vigilantes. They also pursued Mexican revolutionaries and
white cattle rustlers, fought forest fires, and protected silver mines and
railroad trains from striking workers. On foreign soil, they fought in the
Spanish-American War, in the Philippine Insurrection, and in China during the
Boxer Rebellion. Ultimately,their greatest
challenge came not in battle but when the very people they were assigned to
defend attacked them. From the 1867 lynching of three black infantrymen at Fort
Hays, Kansas, to the Houston Riot 50 years later, black troops fought racist
attacks and faced courtmartial and prison, or execution, for their defiance. Ernest A. Thomas, a 24th Infantry private, wrote in the Salt Lake
City tribune in 1896, "we object to being classed as lawless barbarians. We
were men before we were soldiers, we are men now, and will continue to be men
after we are through soldiering."
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