Lewis Walker: History as a Mirror

PHOTO BY KAREN DAY

BY PHILLIP THOMPSON

In 1864, the Idaho Territory was a rugged, unforgiving area rife with potential for any who attempted to tame it, including a Black man from Maryland named Lewis Walker. Uncertainty was the only certainty. Survival demanded self-reliance and a hunger for arduous work. The glittering promise of gold and silver discoveries attracted thousands of prospectors and the commerce that supported them. Walker arrived in Silver City as a barber with intentions of capitalizing on all of these prospective treasures.

Elsewhere in America, Reconstruction was attempting to reunify the societal rift left by the Civil War and the ideological difference of opinions regarding Black citizenship. The book Foundations of Silver City, by Julie Hyslop, details how their Black neighbors were known. “Owyhee County’s top buckaroo, a Black, was referred to as 'Nigger Bill' Hearst. Lewis was referred to as 'Mr. Walker' or 'the colored barber.'" By 1874, however, the book also quotes from historical writings: “Friend Walker is one of our most enterprising citizens and we are glad to welcome him home again,” after his six-month journey back East.

Photo Courtesy of Idaho Black History Museum

Walker was a dignified, learned man with an acumen for business. Coupled with an indelible sense of ambition, he conducted himself in a manner that engendered respect. Eventually, he became a successful entrepreneur with significant financial holdings, including more than a dozen of the town’s buildings and businesses. Many in Silver City referred to him as “The Colonel.” Surveyed within the context of post-Civil War America, Walker’s accomplishments are all the more impressive.

The Thirteenth Amendment emancipating all U.S. slaves wherever they were had been passed only nine years earlier. The well-documented struggles of racial assimilation for newly-freed Blacks faced white hostility in both the North and South. The 14th and 15th Amendments granting full citizenship and voting rights were not fully ratified until 1870. The Idaho Territory, albeit thousands of miles from Gettysberg, was not immune to racial tension. Violent conflicts with local Native American tribes had been going on since Henry Spaulding first arrived in 1838 and continued with the white migration of the 1840s on the Oregon Trail. Once gold was struck in 1862 near Idaho City, Confederate veterans began pouring into Idaho, seeking fortune and escape from the fallen South. In 1865, the territory passed Black and Chinese Exclusionary Laws, forbidding ownership of land. Of note, the Ku Klux Klan white robe on display in the Black History Museum is from Silver City.

PHOTO BY KAREN DAY

Lewis Walker’s self-determination and pioneering success, complicated with the racial realities of his time, might appear to be an example of frontier exceptionalism. Then again, history has a habit of reflecting the present like a many-faceted mirror. As Frederick Douglass once said, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”

For more information, visit the Idaho Black History Museum. 508 Julia Davis Drive, Boise, Idaho or new.ibhm.org