Read Online Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only by Patrick McGilligan - Free Book Online

of 1903. (Two hundred people crowded onstage for the climax, depicting the slaughter of Jews on the streets of Kishinev.)
    Micheaux would never again have as much idle time on his hands as he did between runs in Boston during that winter of 1905. After the winter he quit Pullman, vowing never again to porter, and paid Jessie one last visit in Murphysboro. But this visit left him dissatisfied, and as he looked ahead to homesteading in South Dakota, he began to feel “a little lonely,” he wrote later. “With the grim reality of the situation facing me, I now began to steel my nerves for a lot of new experience which soon came thick and fast.”
    His savings had crept back up to $3,000 by the time he left St. Louis for Bonesteel around the first of April 1905.
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    When Slater, his locator, met him in Bonesteel, the town was abuzz with the news that Dallas, the fledgling town perched on a hill near Micheaux’s homestead, was being promoted as the next railhead after Bonesteel. Micheaux could have sold his new land immediately for a “neat advance over what I had paid,” but he insisted that he had no intention of selling; he was there to farm the land. This didn’t please Slater, and automatically set the newcomer apart from many other area homesteaders, who were more interested in speculation than actually tilling the soil.
    As the two men rode in Dad Burpee’s red stagecoach over the thirty miles to Dallas, Micheaux couldn’t help but notice many brand new structures in the rival towns, “strung in a northwesterly direction across the country,” in Micheaux’s words, like stars forming a constellation. “It was a long ride,” he wrote later, “but I was beside myself with enthusiasm.”
    Arriving in Dallas, “the scene of much activity,” Micheaux found that his reputation as the first and only “colored homesteader” had preceded him. “When I stepped from the stage before the post office,” he recalled, “the many knowing glances informed me that I was being looked for.” Slater introduced him to the Dallas postmaster, then ushered him into the presence of the most important man in town: Ernest A. Jackson, the president of both the bank and the townsite company that was touting Dallas as the best railhead.
    Jackson was the second of three sons of Frank D. Jackson, who had served as the Republican governor of Iowa from 1894 to 1896, and who now presided over the Royal Union Insurance Company in Des Moines,bankrolling the family’s real estate and commercial ventures. Jackson’s father and his two brothers, Frank and Graydon, were also officers of the Dallas bank; they directed the family’s area investments, which included two huge cattle ranches. One, the Mulehead, northeast of Bonesteel, eventually swelled to 169,000 acres.
    The Jacksons maintained a cozy relationship with Marvin Hughitt, the hard-driving leader of the Chicago & North Western, who had built his railroad up from a regional carrier into one of the nation’s largest. Dubbed “King Marvin,” Hughitt had spearheaded the opening of South Dakota to railroads, initially after gold was discovered in the Black Hills. Farsighted in championing train lines to the Missouri River, Hughitt believed that rail routes would pave the way for settlers, whose growing numbers would in turn provide freight for trains, making his investment profitable. The railroad platted the towns, then subcontracted the tracks, the roads, and the buildings.
    Besides money and connections, indispensable in all their dealmaking, the Jacksons evinced something else that Micheaux admired: they had swagger. The Jacksons built frontier towns with more ease than other people carved whistles out of wood, manipulating the land sales, anointing townsites, making each new settled place the hub of an area, the county seat, the prime market, the main railhead—before moving on to