Black History of the Frontier

York hunted with a gun, rode a horse, built wilderness shelters, and swam. From the very beginning, enslaved Black, people were part of the explorationand colonization of the Americas. In 1751, Daniel Boone ventured into the territory. With him every step of the way was his enslaved Black man, Burrell. Burrell cleared the Wilderness Road for white settlers to travel to the land along the Ohio River called Kentucky. In 1778, when white settler Daniel Boone was trapped by the Shawnee, Chief Blackfish brought a member of his tribe, the Black man Pompey to translate. Captured by the Shawnee in a raid, Pompey escaped enslavement and learned the Shawnee language. He convinced Chief Blackfish to not murder Boone, even though he himself was shot later by Boone’s men. Beginning in 1778, General George Rogers Clark marched thousands of miles through trees, hills, gullies, and rivers. He engaged in guerilla battles with tribes who sided with Britain Natives on the western front of the Revolutionary War. His right hand man was Caesar. Working as a hunter, runner, and spy on Shawnee, Iroquois, and Wyandot movements, Caesar was an enslaved Black man owned by the general.

After the Revolutionary War, thousands of white settlers and a few freed people of color swarmed Kentucky. Land companies sold claims without title or treaty and Native raids, attacks, kidnappings were common from 1750 on. As violent as life was on the frontier, there was no guarantee that an escaped Black man, woman or child, could find safe harbor among most of the Native peoples. Enslaved Black men, women, and children did not escape Native attacks.

Enslaved Black men, women and children, could be sold in the slave market in Lexington, Kentucky. They could also be sold or traded to a passing peddler.

In 1832, in his last interview a few months before he died, William Clark told writer Washington Irving that he freed York. Irving, the author of Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow seems to have believed and recorded Clark's statement. There is little evidence to support this. Being emancipated and living as a free person of color meant that the local magistrate and court house would have a record of emancipation signed by the former owner and dated. No such documents exist for York, of any other enslaved person owend by the Clark family.