Recording Race: General Stores and Race in the Late Nineteenth-Century Southwest

Figure 1.

Excerpt from J. J. McAlester's 1875–1878 daybook in which the storeowner distinguishes both tribal citizenship and race. Ledger no. 153, J. J. McAlester Collection, M2046, p. 279, courtesy Western History Collection, Norman, Oklahoma.

"Turbulent" hardly seems an adequate term to describe the volatility of race relations in late-nineteenth-century America. From a Southern perspective, this was the period of Reconstruction, terror campaigns, lynch law, Redemption, and de facto and de jure segregation. From a Western perspective, this was the period of migrations west, Indian wars, and the Dawes Severalty Act. For Texas and Indian Territory, a region that straddled both the South and the West, this was indeed a turbulent time. Across the nation, the challenge of the late nineteenth century was to negotiate new ground rules for governing race relations in the postbellum environment. On the period of Reconstruction, Elliott West recently observed, "Never had our presumptions about race been so jangled and divergent. And never had we faced such fundamental decisions about the arrangement of our racial parts." ¹ Despite federal policies that addressed basic equity issues and assimilation, long-standing attitudes on race prevailed, not just in the South, but in all parts of the nation. Testifying before Congress on the state of race relations in the immediate postwar period, Carl Schurz asserted that "the relations between the white and black races, even if improved by the gradual wearing off of the present animosities, are likely to remain long under the troubling influence of prejudice." ²

In the 1870s and 1880s, America was still recovering from the Civil War and still grappling with that conflict's social and economic ramifications, in particular the numerous calamities (namely poverty, dislocation, and violence) afflicting the roughly 4 million former slaves living in the South. All the while, the nation looked covetously at former, and soon-to-be-former, Indian lands in the West for possible expansion and development. The belief in and pursuit of "progress," so endemic to the Gilded Age, seemed to necessitate the destruction of Indian tribal power and the appropriation of Indian property. ³ In Western outposts, racial tensions existed not only between whites and African Americans, but also between Mexican Americans and Native Americans. The lofty goal of Reconstruction was to overcome the racial and regional divisions of the nation. Of course, the challenge of the period was to meet these idealistic goals at a time when racial boundaries were sharpened, strained, and deeply contentious.

Critical to the Reconstruction impetus was the national policy toward bridging the divides in America through economic and social "consolidation." Regardless of region of origin or skin color, federal authorities attempted to integrate all Americans into the national economy—as both consumers and producers. It should be noted that the motivations behind this consolidation imperative were political and economic; by no means was the government, either sincerely or rhetorically, attempting to consolidate the races. To be sure, few in America would have supported such a policy. Attempts to integrate the hegemonic social or cultural mores of the white middle class filtered through such institutions as the Freedmen's schools for ex-slaves and agency and boarding schools for Indians. Elliott West contends that economic integration for freedmen and Indians came through—at least ideally—forty acres and a mule, sharecropping, and allotment. ⁴ In keeping with this intellectual framework, general stores also enabled such economic integration. In effect, store merchants provided a forum for bringing outsider groups, specifically Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and African Americans, into the national economic agenda. This study examines stores situated in the cotton-rich areas of east Texas—Jacksonville and Melrose (a small community located east of Nacogdoches)—as well as stores located in the more economically diverse regions of south-central Texas, specifically Austin and Refugio. In Indian Territory, the stores under analysis were both located in what is now eastern Oklahoma—Okmulgee, the former capital of the Creek Nation, and McAlester, a community that began as an early trading...