Authors: Betty DeRamus
In 1860, blacks in the Upper Peninsula made up only .89 percent, less than one percent
of the total population of 18,085. In 1990, they were 1.3 percent, nearly as small
a percentage of the population as they were in the nineteenth century. Like the area’s
white population, some left for other opportunities, other occupations, other loves,
other chances to make their mark on the world.
Some early black pioneers, though, left deep and lasting footprints in the snow.
T
his is the story of a white woman who escaped with her own slaves, all of them spooked
by the same set of troubles, all of them on the run. Yet it also is the story of a
young black man who talked a lynch mob out of hanging him and who loved a brown-skinned
woman he’d met only once. The two stories flow into each other the way lakes and rivers
mingle their waters, making it hard to tell exactly where one stops and the other
swirls and splashes to life. But the best place to begin is probably the day nearly
two dozen people, some free and white, some black and enslaved, climbed into a covered
wagon smelling of ginger cakes and bacon, coffee and secrets. When that wagon rolled
out of Kentucky in the fall of 1853, wolves trailed it.
Well, actually, the story starts earlier than that.
It starts with the wolves.
They weren’t the kind of wolves that spent a third of their lives on the move, chasing
snowshoe hares, elk, sheep, beaver, deer, moose, cows and even flightless ducks and
gorging on as much as eighteen pounds of meat at a meal. Yet, in some ways, the scheming,
slave-snatching, lawsuit-filing, property-seizing Gordon brothers were scarier than
wolves, ready to claw their own kin for cash. Joel and William Gordon’s plots frightened
their seventy-nine-year-old sister, Frances, so badly that she decided to run away
with the slaves she was planning to free.
Her companions in an old schooner wagon rumbling out of Kentucky in 1853 were Charlotta
Pyles, fifty-four, a copper-colored slave woman with glossy black braids; Charlotta’s
fair-skinned, free black husband, Henry, usually called Harry, sixty-seven; eleven
of the Pyleses’ enslaved children, five grandchildren and, eventually, a man named
Claycomb, a white preacher from Ohio who came along to help shield the slaves from
the suspicions of slave catchers. Catiline Walker, husband of Charlotta and Harry
Pyles’s daughter, Emily, and Joseph Kendricks, the spouse of daughter Julian Pyles,
lived on different plantations and had to be left behind. But the same question probably
plagued every member of this party, slave or free, male or female, black or white:
What would Joel and William Gordon, men used to grabbing what they wanted, do next?
The stage had been set for this trouble when Harry Pyles, the blue-eyed mulatto son
of a Kentucky slave owner, decided to “marry” Charlotta, an enslaved woman living
on the plantation of Hugh and Sarah Gordon. The Gordons, who owned 422 acres in Washington
County, Kentucky, lived in an area known for burley tobacco and bourbon, alfalfa,
sorghum and hemp. Tennessee-born Charlotta Pyles was the daughter of a slave father
and a Seminole mother, a tribe created by an amalgam of runaway slaves and refugees
from other Florida tribes. Allowed to come and go as he pleased, Harry Pyles made
harnesses, mended shoes, visited his family and, by 1840, lived on the Gordons’ property.
Like other free blacks with enslaved families, he lived with one foot in slavery and
the other in freedom, knowing his wife could be sold at any moment and that he could
not pass on his free status to his children.
It was Scottish-born Hugh Gordon and his never-married daughter, Frances, who changed
what must have seemed, to most Kentuckians, like the natural order of things. While
her father lay dying, Frances promised him that she would free any slaves he left
her. Since none of her brothers and sisters made such promises, it is likely that
it came from Frances’s heart, inspired by the early, undiluted antislavery teachings
of itinerant Methodist preachers. When Hugh Gordon died in 1834 he left two wills,
the first one splitting his estate equally among his twelve children. However, his
second will gave Frances Gordon something extra—the enslaved woman named Charlotta
Pyles. The Gordon heirs all signed papers saying they agreed to this arrangement,
which gave Frances the family plantation for life as well as Charlotta and some of
her children. However, in 1853, the Reverend Joel Gordon, a Baptist minister, and
his brother, William, the administrators of their father’s estate, decided to break
the deal. Actually, they grabbed a hammer and smashed it.
They kidnapped Charlotta’s son, tall, fair-skinned Benjamin Pyles, and sold him in
Mississippi to William P. Moore, who took him to Missouri to raise hemp. Suddenly,
Benjamin Pyles was Benjamin Moore of Lafayette County, Missouri. Suddenly, both the
Pyles family and Frances Gordon were hip deep in quicksand. “This cowardly act of
her own relatives caused Miss Gordon to take immediate action toward removing her
slaves to the North and giving them their freedom,” wrote Grace Morris Allen Jones,
Charlotta and Harry’s granddaughter.
Frances Gordon hurriedly began organizing a move to Minnesota Territory so she could
keep her promise to release the Pyleses, all of whom she now owned. However, when
word of her plans spread to her family, her brothers swooped down again. The Reverend
Joel Gordon filed a lawsuit in September 1853, charging that Frances Gordon, then
nearly eighty, could no longer handle her affairs. He portrayed her as a woman turning
soft around the edges as she melted into old age. If he had won, Joel could have seized
legal control of his sister’s assets, including her slaves. However, in court, Frances
proved she was not the dull knife her brother had described—she cut straight to the
point. She didn’t waste time attacking slavery in a state where slaves were bought
and sold. She merely pointed out that slave owners had the right to do whatever they
pleased with their slaves, including moving them to another state, and that the Washington
County Court had no jurisdiction in the matter. Swayed by her dead-on logic, the jury
decided Frances Gordon was, indeed, both sane and sharp.
That should have ended the sparring and jabbing between Frances and her brothers.
Instead, the brothers scheduled a rematch in the same ring. Joined by Joel Gordon
and other relatives, William Gordonfiled a second lawsuit on October 22, 1853, disputing
Frances’s ownership of her slaves, claiming she had no right to leave the state with
them and, once again, calling her incompetent. This time, the sheriff of Washington
County hauled the Pyles family off to the Springfield, Kentucky, jail, “in the night
and in the rain,” according to the sheriff’s bill for the arrest. The bill came to
$51.35, including $2.25 for hiring three horses, $5 for guards, $1.10 for road toll
fees and $40 for seizing the Pyleses. Frances Gordon accompanied the family to Springfield
and stayed with them until her lawyers got them released two days later. Springfield
jails were not always safe havens. In January 1870, a group of men in disguise would
whisk two farm laborers from the Springfield jail and hang them on a tree one mile
east of town, leaving their bodies suspended until morning. However, the Pyleses survived
their jailing, and Frances Gordon began plotting each step of her escape with her
slaves. She even wrote to an old friend, a white Ohio minister named Claycomb, asking
him to accompany her. He agreed. Meanwhile, Charlotta Pyles, who was famous for her
cooking, began baking gingerbread, cakes, meats and other food for the trip.
By March 1854, the court had thrown out the Gordon brothers’ second lawsuit against
their sister, but by then Frances Gordon and the Pyleses were just memories in Kentucky.
In the fall of 1853, they took off for Minnesota in an old time-weathered schooner
wagon drawn by six thoroughbred Kentucky horses. Household goods crowded the wagon
bed, and the women and children filled the remaining space. It is likely that they,
like other pioneer travelers, took along cast-iron pots, frying pans and a Dutch oven
that could bake almost anything while resting on hot coals. When Frances Gordon discovered
she had forgotten her register book, most likely a property tax list showing an inventory
of her slaves, she returned for it. However, the officers of the court were so angry
over her decision to free her slaves that they refused to surrender it. So she went
on without it.
The group traveled overland to Louisville and there boarded a side-wheel steamboat
on the Ohio River to Cincinnati, possibly to pick up Claycomb; they then backtracked
downriver to the Mississippi and north to St. Louis. In St. Louis, they met a white
man named Nat Stone, who offered to guide the group to Minnesota for one hundred dollars.
Fearful of any setbacks or lost time, Miss Gordon agreed to his price, and the party
set out again in a covered wagon. When Stone demanded another fifty dollars to keep
from turning Charlotta and her children over to Missouri slave traders, Frances Gordon
paid that, too. “In those days when the pro-slavery interests were at fever heat…it
was a very dangerous experience for colored people, especially free negroes, to move
about from place to place,” Charlotta Pyles’s granddaughter, Grace Jones, would later
write.
After St. Louis, they traveled overland, with Barney Pyles, Charlotta and Harry’s
oldest son, doing most of the driving. When the Pyleses crossed the muddy Missouri
River on a ferry to Howard County, they were just a few miles from their kidnapped
son, Benjamin, who now farmed hemp in Waverly, Missouri, the place where abolitionist
John Brown supposedly buried one of his children on his trek to Kansas. On the Gordon
plantation, Benjamin also had hacked hemp, a raw material used to make rope and rough
cloth—it was a job that typically required cutting, hauling and pounding open eighty
to one hundred pounds of hemp stalks per day. The Pyleses had no idea they were near
their missing son. They were well aware, though, that trouble had followed them from
Kentucky. They had left the Gordon brothers behind, but real wolves now sometimes
tracked them.
“It was a tiresome and difficult journey,” wrote Grace Jones. “Often it was necessary
to throw out some meat and to use powder to keep bears and wolves away from the wagon
at night.”
Men also stopped the wagon again and again as it creaked and rumbled through Missouri,
suspecting it might contain runaway slaves with rewards on their heads. However, the
presence of two white men and a white woman protected the black passengers. By the
time the group reached the spot where the Des Moines Rapids and the Mississippi River
came together in a whoosh of water and power, the skies had turned a threatening gray,
and the wind had ice on its breath. In the mid-nineteenth century, steamboats could
not go beyond this point. Passengers had to continue by land or take another boat
upriver. Since Frances Gordon’s canvas-covered schooner wagon was no match for a torrent
of snow and ice, she and the Pyleses stopped there, too.
They had reached Iowa, a place where corn grew high enough to look a man in the eye
and laugh. Though a free state, Iowa was hardly a black haven. Out of a population
of 192,214 in 1850, it had only 265 “free colored” residents, 31 of them in Lee County,
where the Pyleses settled. When it came to black issues, though, Iowa often sent out
scrambled signals. In 1851, the Iowa legislature had passed a law excluding black
migrants, but it was enforced only once, in Keokuk in 1857. Iowa senators George Jones
and August Dodge had voted for all five parts of the Compromise of 1850, which included
the rigorous Fugitive Slave Act, which made it easier to round up and return fugitive
slaves. The Iowa legislature enacted a law letting blacks testify in court, but it
wouldn’t let blacks vote. However, geography made it impossible for Iowa to duck the
slavery question: slaves escaping from Kentucky, Missouri and Tennessee passed through
the state on their way to free Canada.
The Pyles family and Frances Gordon made a home for themselves in Keokuk at the southernmost
tip of Iowa—a place named for a Sac chief named Keokuk who married seven women, loved
horses and liquor, and didn’t resist the arrival of the whites. Harry Pyles, a carpenter,
stonemason and leatherworker, built a substantial brick house for his family and for
Frances Gordon on Johnson Street. The street became the principal thoroughfare of
the raw muddy village and, later, the site of industry and business as well as residences.
Frances Gordon remained with the Pyleses for the rest of her life, now and then visiting
relatives in Illinois, most likely in the Warren County village of Cameron, where
her sister, Sarah Gordon Whitman Johnston, lived. However, Frances’s true family had
become the Pyleses. Both she and Charlotta Pyles belonged to the First Baptist Church
of Keokuk and, according to one Gordon descendant, “Frances came to love Charlotta’s
family more than her own siblings, Charlotta as a daughter and Charlotta’s children
as her grandchildren.” Actually, Gordon had all but adopted young Mary Ellen Pyles
while she was still enslaved, taking the gray-eyed girl to church with her, keeping
her in the Big House and shielding her from punishments. On April 2, 1857, Charlotta
and Henry Pyles took another step to strengthen their family, legally marrying in
their church.
However, another wolf now stalked the family, and its name was lean times.
Barney Pyles had found work driving a freight wagon overland from Keokuk to Des Moines.
Mary Ellen Pyles, then seventeen, worked for a Quaker family in Salem for room and
board and the chance to gain an education. Her sister, Mary Agnes, was able to attend
school, too. Yet by their second year in Iowa, the Pyles family, which included eleven
children and five grandchildren, staggered under a stiff financial load. Charlotta
Pyles came up with a plan to ease that burden, but it was as rough as the family’s
journey to Iowa.
She would raise the money to purchase the freedom of her two left-behind sons-in-law
so they could move to Iowa and help their families. She had letters written to their
owners and discovered that the men could be bought for $1,500 each. To raise that
amount of money, Charlotta Pyles, an unschooled former slave who knew nothing about
the wider world, decided to go east and make antislavery speeches. While making her
travel plans, she heard from her kidnapped son, Benjamin, in Missouri, who somehow
had learned about her plan to free her sons-in-law. He suggested that she buy his
freedom and that of only one son-in-law.