Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only by Patrick McGilligan

“loaded from end to end” with people talking up relinquishments. “I was the only negro on the train and an object of many inquiries as to where I was going. Some of those whom I told that I was going to buy a relinquishment seemingly regarded it as a joke, judging from the meaning glances cast at those nearest them.”
    Arriving in the rowdy town of Bonesteel, Micheaux encountered many more such “meaning glances,” and worse: his autobiographical fiction suggests that this was the first time the young man encountered blatant race prejudice. The town was awash with “locators,” persons who claimed familiarity with the area and drove land-seekers around to look over the best properties. The tour itself was gratis, but if land was purchased the locator was entitled to charge a substantial finder’s fee.
    Micheaux tried enlisting a locator, but the first one he approached declined to escort him. When he finally found a second one, a buggy-driver at a livery stable, the second man, called Slater, told him that the first locator had already warned him that he’d be a fool “to waste his money hauling a d—nigger around the reservation,” because surely Micheaux didn’t have enough money to buy a decent relinquishment.
    Micheaux flushed angrily. “Show me what I want,” he declared, “and I will produce the money.” He demanded to be driven to the far west end of Gregory County, where the relinquishments were said to be cheaper, the soil richer. The two men rode in silence for the three miles from Bonesteel to the reservation line, from which the newly opened lands stretched for thirty miles to the west.
    This was Micheaux’s first tour of the Rosebud, the land he had dreamed of and read about, and in person it seemed to him as beautiful as “the hollow of God’s hand.” The land cast a spell over him. “To the Northeast the Missouri River wound its way, into which empties the Whetstone Creek, the breaks of which resembled miniature mountains, falling abruptly, then rising to a point where the dark shale sides glistened in the sunlight,” he rhapsodized in The Conquest. “It was my longest drive in a buggy. We could go for perhaps three or four miles on a table-like plateau, then drop suddenly into small canyon-like ditches and rise abruptly to the other side.”
    After about fifteen miles, they arrived at the village of Herrick, “a collection of frame shacks with one or two houses, many roughly constructed sod buildings, the long brown grass hanging from between the sod, giving it a frizzled appearance.” Here they paused to listen to “a few boosters and mountebanks,” who gestured and declaimed with “rustic eloquence” on the virtues of Herrick as the prospective county seat and “the coming metropolis of the west.” Herrick was vying to replace the present county seat of Fairfax, about twenty miles east.
    Another eight or nine miles to the northwest, they came upon Burke, a similarly unimpressive podunk striving to become the next county seat. Around Burke, Micheaux noticed, the land was sandy and full of pits, “into which the buggy wheels dropped with a grinding sound, and where magnesia rock cropped out of the soil.” Too sandy for proper farming, he decided, so the pair drove on. Micheaux was growing apprehensive.
    They passed a growing number of spring-fed streams. Then, three miles west of Burke, they ascended a steep hill topped by a grassy plateau. “There lays one of the claims,” said the locator, pointing.
    â€œI was struck by the beauty of the scenery,” Micheaux wrote later, “and it seemed to charm and bring me out of the spirit of depression the sandy stretch brought upon me. Stretching for miles to the northwest and to the south, the land would rise in a gentle slope to a hogback, and as gently slope away to a draw, which drained to the south. Here