Black sailors may have landed in what would become Oregon as early as 1578, with Sir Francis Drake’s expedition. But by the time Saules arrived more than 250 years later, there were perhaps only two dozen Black residents.
In 1844 Saules was living in Oregon City, a growing hub at the end of the Oregon Trail, when he was unwittingly thrust into a fracas over the sale of a horse. An ensuing fight that Saules was likely not involved in left two white settlers and a Native man dead. Not long after, he was accused by a white neighbor of conspiring to destroy his property, and a federal agent for Indian affairs sent a letter to Washington describing Saules and “every other negro” as “dangerous subjects.” He wrote: “Until we have some further means of protection, their immigration ought to be prohibited. Can this be done?”
According to Stocks, Oregon’s settlers were afraid that Black people would conspire with Native tribes to threaten their growing monopoly over the land, and that their presence might also lead to slavery, which, ironically, the settlers were overwhelmingly against. They felt, says Stocks, that “it would devalue white labor to have Black labor here.”
That same year Oregon’s provisional government passed the Black Exclusion Bill, which included a section known as the “Lash Law.” It prohibited African Americans from entering the state, and required all former slaves who had settled in Oregon to leave. Those who failed to obey the order would be publicly flogged with "not less than 20 nor more than 39 stripes.”
When delegates later sat down to write the state’s constitution, they had to settle a thorny question: Should Oregon allow free Blacks to live in the state? Of some 10,000 white men allowed to vote on the matter, more than 8,500 said no. So it was that in 1859, Oregon became the first and only state to enter into the United States with such a prohibition in its constitution.
There are no known incidents of the lash law being enforced, and eventually it was struck from the books. Even so, historians agree that it dissuaded Black people from coming to Oregon.
But there was another, even more effective, deterrent for African Americans moving west.
In 1850 the U.S. Congress had passed the Oregon Donation Land Act, offering up to 320 acres of free land in the territory to any white settler who would cultivate it—an offer not extended to Native Americans, African Americans, and Hawaiians. It was likely the most generous offering at the time, and within a decade Oregon's population had risen six fold. But more than a few Black settlers arrived, took note of the racist laws, and continued on to California or Washington.
“When you think of the Oregon Trail, there’s a reason that narrative doesn't include Black people in your mind,” says Stocks. “Because they were excluded from the Manifest Destiny that brought people out here.”