Enslaved People at Bent’s Fort: Dick, Charlotte and Andrew on the Southwest Borderlands

Bent’s Fort, the base of the Bent brothers’ trading firm, depended on a sizable workforce. Part of it was not employed at all: it was made up of people enslaved by the Bent family. Silas Bent, father of the traders Charles and William, was an enslaver, and some of his children became enslavers too. The enslaved people who appear most often in the records of the fort are Dick, Charlotte and Andrew.

The fireplace in the cook’s quarters at the reconstructed fort, with the kitchen through the open door. NPS photo.

Dick

Silas Bent’s estate inventory of October 6, 1828, lists “1 Negro boy Dick 12 years old.” When Dick was taken to Bent’s Fort is uncertain, perhaps in 1837: that August, William C. Carr, the husband of the Bent brothers’ sister Dorcas, wrote to her that he supposed she had sent Dick to Mr. St. Vrain by then.

Later witnesses remembered him as a cook. William M. Boggs recalled Dick in 1844 as “the negro man…that William Bent had for a cook,” and William Bent’s son George remembered him the same way, writing in 1906 that Dick “could talk Cheyenne some” and that his Cheyenne name was “Turtle Shell.”

In 1847 Dick joined Colonel Sterling Price’s campaign to crush those behind the Taos Revolt, in which his enslaver, Charles Bent, had been killed. A list of the killed and wounded compiled by Lieutenant Richard Smith Elliott, a correspondent for the St. Louis Reveille, records for the fight with insurgents at El Embudo on January 29: “Dick, (a black servant of Gov. Bent) severely wounded.”

Charlotte

Dick’s wife, Charlotte, is the fort’s cook in the accounts of the travelers Ruxton and Garrard — which makes Boggs’s memory of Dick as the cook a little puzzling, unless Dick cooked for William Bent on expeditions away from the fort. Ruxton wrote that she presided over the kitchen, liked to call herself the only lady in all of Indian country, and was famous from Long’s Peak to the Cumbres Españolas for her slapjacks and pumpkin pies; Garrard called her the fort’s “culinary divinity.”

According to Garrard, the company freed both Charlotte and Dick “for the valor evinced by the latter, Dick, at the Pueblo de Taos.” In 1847 he met them both on the Santa Fe Trail, heading east.

Andrew

Another enslaved man at the fort, Andrew, is thought to have been Dick’s brother. No Andrew appears in Silas Bent’s 1828 inventory, though it lists a boy about 10 months old who might have been him, despite the large gap in age. Andrew appears in the spring of 1837 in a memorandum by Robert Newell, an employee of Bent, St. Vrain & Co., trading on the South Platte River with other company men, and again on William Bent’s Indian trading license for 1848 as “Andrew (black).”

Others may have been enslaved by the Bents too. One of Francis Cragin’s informants, Fred Fleshman, remembered “Billy (a mulatto cook of Bill Bent prior to 1869 for 35 yrs.),” and Boggs mentioned “the large negro blacksmith” — perhaps Dick, perhaps Andrew, perhaps someone else.

Lost to the record

Historians have long called Dick, Charlotte and Andrew by the surname “Green,” a name that seems to have begun with Grinnell, or possibly with George Bent. But no contemporary account gives them any surname, and freed people usually took their former enslavers’ names. Where “Green” came from is a mystery. What became of them is a bigger one: none appears in the 1850 census for Missouri under Green or Bent. George Bent believed the brothers died in St. Louis but gave no date, and whether they had children is unknown. After that, Dick, Charlotte and Andrew disappear from history.

Slavery at the edge of the country

Enslaved African Americans working at Bent’s Fort and elsewhere in the southwestern borderlands have received little attention from scholars. Several Santa Fe traders are known to have brought enslaved servants along the trail, and the Bents seem to have traveled with theirs often.

Accounts of slavery in nearby St. Louis show how different it looked depending on who described it. Paul Wilhelm, Duke of Württemberg, visiting in 1823, portrayed household slaves as devoted to the families that held them — an impression drawn from a brief stay and a certain class of household. William Wells Brown, enslaved in St. Louis for eight years before escaping, wrote in 1848 that “no part of our slaveholding country is more noted for the barbarity of its inhabitants than St. Louis.” And Mark Twain, recalling his boyhood in Hannibal, Missouri, observed that “if the slaves themselves had an aversion to slavery they were wise and said nothing.”

Sources

Based on "Enslavement in the Southwest Borderlands," Bent’s Old Fort National Historic Site, National Park Service, adapted from Mark L. Gardner’s 2004 Historic Resource Study Bent’s Old Fort on the Arkansas; rewritten in hubnx’s own words. Quotations are from the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century sources it cites.