High in the Rockies, archaeologists have
discovered evidence of mountain life
4,000 years ago
By MATT STIRN
Tuesday, May 26, 2020
The Wind River Range in the Rocky Mountains stretches 100 miles across northwestern Wyoming and the Continental Divide, extending from the thick pine forests of Yellowstone National Park toward the vast grasslands of the Great Plains. From the river valleys and lakes below, the peaks of the mighty “Winds” rise toward the sky, reaching 13,000 feet above sea level. These granite towers pierce the clouds and are surrounded by high-altitude plateaus dotted with tundra and remnants of Ice Age glaciers. From a distance, they appear imposing, barren, and hostile, but closer inspection reveals a vibrant scene—herds of bighorn sheep traversing the horizon, marmots peeking up from boulder fields, and clusters of ancient whitebark pines standing watch over it all.
On the outskirts of a scraggly whitebark pine forest at 11,000 feet above sea level in the northern stretch of the range, a plume of smoke rises from a campfire as lunch is prepared in cast iron cookware over the open flames. Tents are spread out across the alpine meadow, and the whinnies of horses echo against nearby cliffs. It is a scene reminiscent of a nineteenth-century frontier camp, except for the presence of a bright yellow surveying instrument and the metallic ting of trowels as archaeologists scrape them against the pebbly soil. The site, known as High Rise Village, is perched on a hillside that would make a challenging black-diamond ski run. It was a large settlement occupied by the seminomadic Shoshone people from around 4,000 years ago until the nineteenth century. Discovered in 2006 by University of Wyoming archaeologist Richard Adams, High Rise Village was the first and largest of nearly two dozen high-elevation villages to be identified in the Wind River Mountains, and has provided new insight into how prehistoric people thrived in the high alpine zone of the Rocky Mountains.
Alpine archaeology is a relatively new field in North America. Conducting fieldwork in remote high-altitude areas is expensive and physically demanding. “Before the advent of modern, lightweight camping equipment, it often wasn’t possible to run prolonged projects in the mountains,” says Adams. As a result, the craggy peaks and wind-whipped ridges of the American West long remained a blank spot on the map of prehistoric North America.
In the 1960s, Colorado State University archaeologist Jim Benedict identified miles of stone walls along the plateaus of Colorado’s Front Range, evidence of communal game drives constructed to corral large herds of bighorn sheep. Around two decades later, University of California, Davis, archaeologist Robert Bettinger discovered multiple alpine villages near 12,000 feet in California’s White Mountains. Farther east, at 11,000 feet in Nevada’s Toquima Range, David Hurst Thomas of the American Museum of Natural History found the Alta Toquima site, remains of a massive prehistoric village high in the alpine tundra consisting of dozens of depressions known as house pits. The discovery of such substantial sites in remote alpine settings was astonishing to many scholars across the western United States who had long considered the mountains too hostile for sustained human occupation. What led ancient people to build at such high elevations was an open question—did they actively choose to live in the alpine tundra, or were they forced there by factors such as population pressure or climate change? This question has fueled debate among alpine archaeologists worldwide, and each summer more researchers venture high into the mountains seeking answers.
In the fall of 1995, avocational archaeologist and hunting guide Tory Taylor tripped over a bowling ball–size blue rock while taking shelter under some trees during a thunderstorm in the northern Wind River Range. Turning it over, he recognized the object as a bowl that had been carved out of soapstone. Before this, no archaeological work had ever been attempted in the Winds. Several years later, the news of Taylor’s find reached Adams, who was researching soapstone artifacts found throughout the Rocky Mountains. Adams contacted Taylor and, upon learning more about the discovery, planned a survey expedition with him to investigate the area.
In 2003, Adams, Taylor, and a group of volunteers hiked deep into the Wind River Mountains, with their equipment on horseback, for the first field season of what would become a project that is still going on 16 years later. During the initial surveys, the team recorded more than a dozen prehistoric sites above 10,000 feet. Scattered across the surface of the alpine tundra, the football field–size sites included tens of thousands of chert flakes, eroding hearths, hundreds of complete tools including scrapers, knives, and projectile points, and broken ceramic vessels and soapstone bowls. The size and number of sites discovered above the tree line indicated that hunter-gatherers had frequented the alpine terrain since the end of the Ice Age and that people had a much deeper history in the Wind River Range than had been previously realized.
While the large number of artifact-rich sites Adams discovered offered proof that ancient people had traveled in the Winds, questions remained about how the sites were actually used. Did they reflect occasional forays to higher elevations for hunting and foraging, or did they, as Adams speculated, suggest that people had established an enduring society in the mountains?
In 2003, when Adams investigated a wickiup, or wooden tepee, that had recently burned in a forest fire, he made what he recalls as one of the most startling discoveries of his career. Where the small wooden structure had once stood amid thick grass and pine trees, the forest fire had revealed a lodge pad, a stone-lined circular platform cut out of the hillslope that had once served as the foundation for a wooden house structure. Thousands of artifacts were eroding out of it. Adams realized that the lodge pad resembled structures found in the alpine villages excavated by Bettinger in the White Mountains and Thomas in the Toquima Range. The discovery showed that prehistoric people hadn’t just occasionally traveled in these mountains, but had actually built at least one semipermanent settlement. “Alpine villages were considered to be an exclusively Great Basin phenomenon,” Adams says. “We were surprised to find that they likely existed in Wyoming, too.” While the find established that alpine villages may have existed in the Winds, Adams needed more evidence to determine if they were common, or if the lodge pad found at the site of the burned wickiup was simply a fascinating anomaly.
In fall 2006, Adams was exploring a newly burned alpine forest with a team of volunteers. During a lunch break on the side of a steep slope dotted with granite boulders, Joyce Evans, an experienced avocational archaeologist, noticed a platter-size piece of sandstone that stood out against the surrounding rocks. Evans picked up the stone and realized that it was a heavily used grinding stone, or metate. It was clear evidence that prehistoric people had not only settled on this slope, but also had invested long periods of time there, as it would have taken several generations of grinding to make a rough sandstone so smooth and polished. Walking a few hundred feet from the rest of the team, Evans found a flat platform cut into the hillside that was full of chert flakes, and then another with a projectile point, and still more encircled by stone walls. Unbeknownst to them, Adams and his team had sat down for a rest in what turned out to be the largest alpine village yet discovered in the Rocky Mountains.
Over the next several years, Adams and his team mapped and excavated the new site, which they dubbed High Rise Village after the 300-foot distance between the settlement’s lowest point and its highest, equivalent to a 30-story building. Their excavations revealed that the site was massive, with more than 60 lodge pads cut into the steep mountain slope. The discovery of such a large village took archaeologists aback. “Finding Alta Toquima and the White Mountain villages were such big surprises, we assumed that they were two of a kind and nobody was going to find any others,” says Thomas. “So it was another large surprise when a new village appeared in the Wind River Range.”
Despite the recent forest fire, the buried archaeological remains at High Rise Village, including the remains of tepee- and log cabin–shaped wooden wickiups that once stood atop the lodge pads, were exceptionally well-preserved. Many of the lodges also contained well-preserved hearths. Radiocarbon dating of charcoal from the hearths showed that people lived at High Rise Village as early as 2000 b.c., and that it was occupied continuously until about a.d. 1850. The artifacts the team recovered from the nine-foot-wide circular pads numbered in the tens of thousands, and included hundreds of chert and obsidian projectile points, as well as knives, scrapers, drills, bone needles, grinding stones, soapstone pendants, red ochre nodules, and broken ceramic vessels. The array of artifacts was typical of those made by the Mountain Shoshone people, also known as Sheepeaters after their affinity for hunting sheep. It’s likely that a band of that tribe inhabited the village.
Adams and his team suggest that multigenerational families spent their time on the mountain hunting, foraging, processing pine nuts, and making and repairing a variety of tools. The excavations also indicated an intriguing level of social organization at the site, and that the village’s seasonal inhabitants may have used different lodge pads for particular activities. The artifacts from one lodge, for example, consisted of stone tools used to make projectile points, whereas another lodge contained only artifacts associated with butchering meat and cleaning hides. A third contained only artifacts and flakes left from making bifaces, multipurpose stone tools used for cutting and scraping. “While we have only excavated a portion of the 60-plus lodges at High Rise, based on our current sample size it does appear that there was craft specialization or some division of labor at the site,” says Adams. The team’s discoveries suggest that the seminomadic inhabitants of High Rise Village had a complex social structure that they maintained even as they moved high into the mountains.
When not excavating at High Rise Village, Adams and his team ventured farther into the Wind River Range. They recorded nearly 100 prehistoric sites, identified quarries where soapstone was mined, and found four more, smaller, alpine villages. After years of working at High Rise Village, Adams became adept at spotting the faint remains of lodge pads. “I realized that the majority of lodge pads were informal and relatively difficult to recognize,” Adams says. “There was a good chance that before High Rise, we had walked right through several villages.” Adams returned to several previously identified sites, including the burned wickiup, and discovered that many were part of large prehistoric villages that had been overlooked. In addition to finding that alpine villages were much more prevalent than previously known, Adams and his team realized that the sites were all located in whitebark pine forests, on inclined sunny slopes, and at 10,500 to 11,000 feet above sea level. It was almost as if ancient people created one alpine village and replicated it atop other mountains throughout the northern Winds.
Given the prevalence of grinding stones found at the sites and their location in whitebark pine stands, it appeared that the villages’ earliest inhabitants chose their locations in order to harvest and process pine nuts, one of the fattiest food sources available to prehistoric people in Wyoming. To test this hypothesis, the team created a predictive model incorporating satellite, terrain, and environmental information over a large area to identify the best locations for people to harvest the nuts. The team then set out on horseback, toward the higher barren slopes of the Continental Divide, in search of the predicted sites. Using the model as a guide, they traversed turquoise glacial rivers, steered clear of grizzly bears, and navigated miles of alpine boulder fields. Ultimately, they identified 14 more prehistoric villages exactly where the model had predicted they would be.
Even after the team discovered that the alpine villages were so numerous, they still wondered why people would want to live long-term in such a severe environment as the Wind River Range when trout-filled lakes dotted the foothills and bison herds roamed the prairie below. Some scholars view high elevations as a difficult landscape where food was generally scarce, unpredictable, and required a great deal of energy to acquire. This would suggest that ancient people may have chosen to build villages in the mountains to escape rising population pressure or prolonged droughts in the surrounding lowlands. “Because high-altitude archaeology is in an extreme environment, it acts as a barometer on the state of a wider human system,” says University of Wyoming archaeologist Robert Kelly. He believes that the occupation of high-altitude villages waxed and waned depending on low-elevation conditions. “If there was a reduction in important resources at lower elevations,” he says, “then groups might have expended the extra energy to acquire other resources from high elevations.”
But other archaeologists, including Adams, believe the resources available in the mountains drew prehistoric people regardless of conditions in the valleys below, especially during certain seasons. Around mid-July in Wyoming, many low-altitude sources of water dry out, making it challenging for plants and animals to survive. The mountains during this time, however, teem with edible plants and herds of deer, elk, and bighorn sheep. For groups like the Shoshone, who were familiar with the seasonal growing cycles of plants and migration patterns of animals, the mountains would have offered bountiful opportunities for hunting and gathering throughout most of the summer. “I suspect that, as soon as the snow melted, people hiked into the mountains to harvest springtime root crops, then berries and tubers later in the summer, and whitebark pine nuts in the fall,” says Adams. In his view, high elevations provided an environment that was no more difficult to survive in than the surrounding lowlands and required only a familiarity with the landscape.
Whether the Mountain Shoshone were pushed or pulled into the mountains, the Wind River Range held great significance for them. The mountains played a central role in their mythology and remain important to their descendants today. “The Winds provide for our people in many ways—from the snow-capped peaks that provide us with water to the abundance of wild game, they have always given us what we need to survive,” says linguist Lynette St. Clair, a member of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe. “We hold them in high regard, take only what will sustain us, and offer our prayers as an exchange.” In the late 1800s, the remaining bands of Mountain Shoshone were moved out of the mountains and onto the nearby Wind River Reservation. As they assimilated into a larger and more diverse Shoshone community, many of their stories were lost. Adams and his team now hope that their work may help recover forgotten aspects of the mountain people’s history.
One promising avenue of research is being pursued by environmental archaeologist Rebecca Sgouros of the nonprofit Paleocultural Research Group. By analyzing residues absorbed into artifacts, she and her colleagues hope to connect the archaeological record to Shoshone oral tradition. “We know that there were plenty of edible resources available to people in the mountains,” Sgouros explains, “but what if we could know specifically what they were eating and what plants and animals were of special importance?” Sgouros has found residues on metates from the alpine villages that show that people used them to process pine nuts, animal fat, berries, and dried meat—the ingredients for pemmican, a traditional Native American food. Lipids extracted from pottery vessels also found in the alpine villages show evidence that they were used to cook elk, moose, and bear with chokecherries, biscuit-root, and leafy greens. Several soapstone vessels contained residues of pine nuts, chokecherries, rendered fat, and trout, a combination that matches the recipe for a Shoshone fish stew recorded in the early nineteenth century. “We are seeing evidence of foods that we know were historically important to the Shoshone,” says Sgouros. “And we are getting to look beyond simple ingredients and actually get glimpses into cuisine and culture.”
After 17 years of fieldwork, thousands of miles hiked, and hundreds of nights sleeping under the stars, Adams and his team still hope to better understand how people’s relationship with the Wind River Range evolved over time and what daily life was like for those who chose to live in the high mountains. Once the spring snow melts and bighorn sheep begin to return to their summer range, the team will saddle their horses, triple-check the coffee supply, and venture once again onto the trail and into the towering peaks of the Winds.
Matt Stirn is a journalist and photographer based in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and Brookline, Massachusetts.
At a Union Army camp in Kentucky, enslaved
men, women, and children struggled for their lives
and fought to be free
By JARRETT LOBELL
Friday, May 08, 2020
The only complete original building still standing at Camp Nelson in Jessamine County, Kentucky, is a sizeable house built around 1850 for the just-married Oliver Perry and his bride, the former Fannie Scott, whose family owned the land on which the house sits. It is now called simply the White House. But between 1863 and 1865, at the height of the Civil War, it was just one of more than 300 structures in the center of the camp’s 4,000 acres that housed all the required resources for an army at war. These included a supply depot, hospital, commissary, prison, ordnance storage facility, stables and corrals, a 50,000-gallon reservoir, woodworking shop, blacksmith shop, horseshoeing shop, harness shop, and a bakery that produced 10,000 rations of bread a day. There was also a hotel and tavern called the Owens House, a post office, and a few small eating establishments. Camp Nelson had been built to support the Union Army’s advance into Tennessee, and over its years of wartime service, tens of thousands of soldiers, both white and black, enlisted and were trained there. Camp Nelson was the largest of the eight U.S. Colored Troops (USCT) recruiting centers in Kentucky, and the third largest in the nation. All that remains aboveground, apart from the White House, though, are the remains of eight earthen and two stone forts, the earthen remains of a powder magazine, remnants of a few icehouses, and the stone foundations of two ovens.
During recent excavations in an area known from nineteenth-century maps to have been the camp’s only licensed sutler’s establishment, a type of general store, Camp Nelson National Monument archaeologist Stephen McBride and a team from Transylvania University began to uncover picture frames, glass plates, mats, and glass bottles that originally contained chemicals used to develop photographs. They also found bottles embossed with the brand names “Bears Oil,” which had once held hair oil, and “Dr D Jayne,” which had once held hair dye. Soldiers used the dye to darken their hair for portraits, since light hair could appear white in the finished images, prematurely aging the subjects. In addition to these artifacts, the team also uncovered the remains of a small building—the first specialized photography studio ever found at a Civil War site. “The studio wasn’t documented on any extant maps of the camp, and Civil War photos were often taken in tents,” McBride says, “so finding something set up as a permanent photo studio was a real surprise.” The team recovered 10 metal stencils the photographer had used to sign his images and was therefore able to identify him as a man named C.J. Young. (See “The Age of Pictures.”)
But Camp Nelson’s population consisted of more than photographers, merchants, carpenters, blacksmiths, bakers, and soldiers. Many black volunteers arrived with their families, creating a huge influx of refugee women and children. “Camp Nelson is one of the best preserved archaeological sites associated with USCT recruitment,” McBride says. “And it’s also one of the best places to explore the refugee experiences of African American slaves seeking freedom during the Civil War.” Through his work, McBride hopes to resurrect the too-often-lost stories of these women and children uprooted by the war that would determine their destiny.
Sidebar:
The Age of Pictures
Black military enlistees in Kentucky were in a treacherous position. Kentucky did not secede from the Union, but slavery remained legal, and the state’s political leadership was vehemently opposed to the recruitment or enlistment of African Americans. They reasoned that a person could not be both a soldier and a slave. “The men could enlist with their owner’s permission,” McBride says, “but, as far as I know, not very many slave owners gave their permission.” A rare exception was that of Pvt. William Wright, whose owner, John Russell of Franklin County, allowed him to enlist. Russell received a signing bonus of $300. “Even without permission, black men came anyway, and they were rejected and exposed to violence both coming and going,” adds McBride.
On July 17, 1862, the U.S. Congress passed the Second Confiscation Act, which authorized the president to seize all property belonging to the Confederate states, including enslaved people. On the same day, the Militia Act was passed, empowering the president to use former slaves in any military capacity “for which he deemed them competent.” The Emancipation Proclamation followed in September. “While originally President Abraham Lincoln’s singular stated goal for the war was to preserve the Union, he walked a tightrope when it came to slavery,” says historian Joseph Glatthaar of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “After the Proclamation, his goals shifted and he recognized the need to destroy the institution of slavery. This was the only way he saw to preserve the Union.” According to the Emancipation Proclamation, all enslaved people in the “rebellious states” were freed as of January 1, 1863. This allowed recruitment of black soldiers to begin in earnest. As Union forces advanced deeper into Confederate territory, more and more fugitive slaves volunteered for military duty. “These people escaped from slavery and liberated themselves because they heard of the arrival of the army close to them, and they hoped for safe haven and protection,” says historian James Downs of Connecticut College. “They left in a state of emergency, often under the cover of night, and made decisions in the middle of a major war.” By the end of the Civil War, 178,975 free and freed black men had served in the Union Army in 175 USCT regiments, constituting about onetenth of the army’s manpower. The USCT also included Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, and Asian Americans. An additional 19,000 African American men served in the U.S. Navy, and more than 37,000 black soldiers died for the Union cause.
Kentucky didn’t allow black men to enlist until 1864, and historian Ann Murrell Taylor of the University of Kentucky explains that it was the state where emancipation proceeded most slowly. “The traditional notion of Lincoln striking down slavery with his pen is a fantasy,” says Downs, “and slavery remained intact in Kentucky in any case, even after the war.” Nevertheless, by the end of the Civil War, 23 regiments of men of color had been formed there, totaling some 23,500 soldiers. In May 1864, after the army removed the requirement for owners to give their permission, 250 men enlisted in the USCT at Camp Nelson in just one day.
“I wanted to learn about the day-to-day lives of these men,” McBride says. “What possessions did they have that didn’t fit army regulations? What weapons did they use? What did they eat?” During the course of his excavations, McBride has located not only mess houses for civilian employees that were well known from contemporaneous maps, but also poorly documented USCT housing. This includes evidence of huts, streets that had become refuse-filled drainage ditches, and a few cellars, as well as objects from soldiers’ daily lives such as buttons; metal cups, plates, and pots; and some ceramic cups and plates as well. He has also found arms and ammunition that suggest the men used a wide variety of both up-to-date weapons and antiquated Model 1816 Springfield muskets.
Sidebar:
The Age of Pictures
On the basis of the animal bones and archaeobotanical evidence that has been unearthed, McBride says that what meat the USCT enlistees did eat consisted of relatively poor cuts of beef, such as ribs and hind shanks, supplemented with pork hams and hocks, and that they consumed a great deal of legumes, particularly beans, cowpeas, and lentils. For refreshment, they had whiskey, beer, and champagne, despite the fact that they were not officially permitted to drink. “Some of the most surprising artifacts we uncovered in the encampment were those associated with women and children, including colored glass beads, a brooch, a barrette, and porcelain doll fragments,” says McBride. “This indicated that wives and children were living with their soldier husbands and fathers, which was strictly against army policy.” The wives and children of soldiers are mentioned rarely, if ever, in records of the time, so these artifacts are some of the only evidence of Camp Nelson’s shadow population.
In all, 5,700 African American soldiers enlisted at Camp Nelson and at least 5,000 more were trained there. Although the army discouraged the men from bringing their wives and children with them, the soldiers’ families nonetheless continued to arrive. “I think that we underestimate these women’s will to chart their own path to freedom,” says historian Brandi Brimmer of Spelman College. “Black men’s path is through military enlistment, even under the Confiscation Acts, but slave women’s route is very different. They don’t have a policy in place to support them and they have to find their own way.”
At first, most of the refugee families lived in huts and small cabins they hastily built themselves. They received no food rations or care. “The army really didn’t know what to do with them,” McBride says, “especially because, unlike their enlisted husbands and fathers, they were still technically enslaved.” Even though the Union was not prepared to allow women and children into facilities like Camp Nelson, they went anyway, took up residence, and were often kicked out. Between June and November of 1864, on nine different occasions, according to Taylor, Camp Nelson’s women and children were expelled. One of the most disastrous of these regular expulsions occurred in late November of 1864, when many women and children died of exposure and malnutrition during a particularly cold and windy month. “There is no bureaucracy to chronicle these people’s illnesses, and their death is a direct result of their experiences as refugees,” says Downs. “Their deaths, and those of others who died in the camp, were not recorded. They were anonymous, their lives and deaths not named.”
But families escaping slavery kept coming. “Black men made it clear they were not going to continue to enlist without a path to freedom for themselves and their families,” says Brimmer. In December of 1864, the army began to build the Home for Colored Refugees at Camp Nelson. The status of African Americans was still very much in question as far as Union officials were concerned: Were the women and children legally attached to a soldier? What constituted a legal marriage between enslaved or formerly enslaved people? What about the aging women and men unfit to serve? Nevertheless, more than 3,000 people were allowed into the home during the last year of the war. “While it is true that the camp became more open to women and children,” says Taylor, “and that there were new cottages, an opportunity for schooling and to go to church, and a chance to work and build a new life, the camp was still a significant source of turbulence, danger, violence, illness, and death.”
Sidebar:
The Age of Pictures
While little archaeological evidence of the huts and cabins of the original women and children’s camp remains, McBride has been able to reconstruct what the Home for Colored Refugees looked like through excavation, archival research, and by reviewing photographs. The Home consisted of four dormitories or wards, an office, a two-story school, 97 duplex cottages for nuclear families, and, when the cottages filled up, 60 tents supplied by the army. At the pre-expulsion site of the huts and cabins, McBride found a great deal of evidence of food preparation including ceramics used for serving food, cast-iron kettles, and fragments of steel cooking utensils, as well as evidence of chimneys used for heating and cooking. He also uncovered evidence of food consumption—bones from poor-quality cuts of pork, mediumto poor-quality cuts of beef, chicken bones, and a small number of rabbit and fish bones, as well as liquor bottles. At the Home for Colored Refugees, however, the team found little to no evidence of either food preparation or consumption. Instead, there was a large mess hall where, explains McBride, the army strongly encouraged women and children to eat all their meals rather than cook for themselves.
McBride also uncovered some evidence of how women earned money to buy food and clothing. In the northwest section of the encampment, he unearthed fireplaces and a large concentration of cast-iron kettles and an iron, as well as a great number of both intact and broken buttons, seed beads, and hooks and eyes, all evidence of a laundry facility dating to before the November 1864 expulsion. “Especially early on, doing laundry was, along with cooking, one of the primary ways escaped slaves bartered or earned money for food,” says McBride. “They didn’t know what would happen to them, but they thought there was a chance of attaining freedom and had to adapt quickly to their situation.” But, they were still enslaved.
On March 3, 1865, the wives, children, and mothers of USCT soldiers were finally emancipated by Congressional act. Five weeks later, General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. For all intents and purposes, the Civil War was over. The USCT had played a crucial role, having been involved in 41 major battles and 449 skirmishes. “The black soldiers compensated for a lack of training with extraordinary valor,” says Glatthaar. “In the face of assumptions that they would be cowardly, they could not afford to fail.” For African American slaves, enlistment meant freedom for themselves, and, in some cases, their families. But, despite the Union victory, even after the war, their situation in Kentucky was nearly as difficult as it had been before and during it. “White Kentuckians did all they could to try to extend the system of slavery and to shut down the paid labor market for black men and women,” says Taylor. After the war, Camp Nelson remained an important African American community even as its residents were still being kidnapped and enslaved. On December 6, 1865, the 13th Amendment was ratified, abolishing slavery throughout the United States. Nevertheless, in the 1870s, 7,000 African Americans would flee the state.
The impact of the USCT on the outcome of the war and the opportunity it provided for liberation cannot be overstated. On September 26, 1864, Elijah P. Marrs, a slave who had been born in January of 1840 in Shelby County, Kentucky, to a free man and an enslaved mother, enlisted in Lexington along with 27 other men. On their journey from their homes to the city, they carried with them 26 war clubs and one rusty pistol, and were accompanied by a Newfoundland dog for a spell. Marrs recalls in his memoir that he was immediately marched out onto Third Street to Taylor Barracks and mustered to Company L, Twelfth U. S. Colored Artillery, which was assigned to Camp Nelson. “This is better than slavery, though I do march in line to the tap of the drum,” Marrs writes. “I felt freedom in my bones, and when I saw the American eagle, with outspread wings, upon the American flag, with the motto, ‘E Pluribus Unum,’ the thought came to me, ‘Give me liberty or give me death.’ Then all fear banished. I had quit thinking as a child and had commenced to think as a man.”
Jarrett A. Lobell is editor in chief at ARCHAEOLOGY. For further reading, click here.