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On May 5, 1851, at Fort Vancouver, U.S. Army Captain Llewellyn Jones signed a paper setting a woman free:
Mommia Travers, a black woman, aged about forty-five, bought by me from Isaac Burbayge, in April, 1849, I have this day given her freedom unconditionally, and she is in all respects free to go and do as may seem to her most to her advantage, without let or hindrance from me, my agents, heirs or assigns.
Beneath it he added that she was "an honest and perfectly conscientious woman" who "deserves kind and good treatment at the hands of every one." This manumission — release from slavery — and one line in a census are nearly all that survive of Monimia Travers, whose name Jones spelled "Mommia." Within days of signing it, Jones left the territory, and she was free in a place whose laws said she could not be there.
The 1850 U.S. Census for Oregon Territory lists Monimia Travers in the Jones household at the fort. National Archives and Records Administration.
What two documents can tell us
The manumission gives her approximate age, her status, the fact that at least two men held her in slavery, how she came west, and how her last enslaver described her — and, above all, her freedom. What it cannot give is her life: whether she married or had children she was parted from when Jones took her west, who her friends were at the fort, what she did with her freedom. The record is silent, and historians can only reach toward answers through the larger context and the experiences of others.
Slavery and exclusion in the Northwest
Enslaved African Americans were held in pre-Civil War Oregon and Washington, including at what is now Fort Vancouver National Historic Site. Census records suggest that only 35 enslaved African Americans set foot in Oregon Territory between 1843 and 1855, and Travers is the only documented Black woman at Fort Vancouver until the World War II era. Oregon itself was multiracial — Native Americans, Chinese and Hawaiian migrants, Métis and white settlers — and that reality shaped a politics of white supremacy.
| Year | Law or decision |
|---|---|
| 1840s–50s | Territorial governments prohibit slavery — softened in 1844 by a pro-slavery minority, who won enslavers three years to remove enslaved people |
| 1844, 1849 | Black exclusion laws order Black migrants out of the territory on pain of physical punishment, jail or forced labor |
| 1850 | Congress's Oregon Donation Land Act lets only white male citizens, and people with half or less "Indian blood," claim up to 640 acres |
| 1857 | Oregon's constitutional convention limits the vote to white men and bars any "Negro, Chinaman, or mulatto" from voting |
Many settlers were "free soilers", who wanted the West kept for white farm families, free of competition from slavery and plantation agriculture. The exclusion laws were enforced. In September 1851, the Oregon Spectator reported a judge ordering a Black man named Vanderpool banished:
There is no use of enacting laws if they are to remain a dead letter on our statute book…Thirty days are allowed them to clear the Territory.
The march west
In autumn 1849, the Army's Regiment of Mounted Riflemen ended its march along the Oregon Trail at Fort Vancouver and Oregon City, bringing several hundred soldiers and officers and a few families. Jones, a West Point graduate from New York State, traveled with his wife, two daughters and Travers in a large mule-drawn spring wagon whose seats folded into beds, as his daughter Frederica later recalled. The march is richly documented, mile by mile — and that scholarship never mentions Travers.
At the fort, soldiers and families lived in tents and log buildings on the north bank of the Columbia, in view of Mount Hood, while the British Hudson's Bay Company still ran its post beside them with a workforce of Hawaiians, Scots, French-Canadians, Iroquois, Orkney Islanders and Métis. Other slave narratives suggest she was likely lonely and conflicted there, the only Black and enslaved woman in a place hostile to non-white people.
Why he freed her
The reason is lost, but there are clues. By early May 1851 the regiment had been ordered to New Mexico, a surprise to some. On May 1, artillery officer Major John S. Hatheway wrote of men who, after marching thousands of miles and spending eighteen months building their quarters, "are suddenly ordered to fight the Indians in New Mexico," adding: "It is no place for a family, the Army." If Jones's wife and daughters went back east, an enslaved woman would have complicated their journey. And Oregon's laws made slavery there untenable. His plea that his "agents, heirs or assigns" leave her alone may show he knew that freedom in that territory was not a generous gift.
After
The manumission is the last trace of Travers; she has not been found in any later census of Oregon or Washington. It is unlikely she stayed somewhere so hostile, so far from whoever she had been separated from. After the Civil War, Oregonians passed poll taxes aimed at keeping non-white residents out, banned interracial marriage and helped lead the push for national Chinese exclusion laws.
Sources
Based on "Monimia Travers: A Story of Slavery and Freedom at Fort Vancouver," by Greg Shine, updated by Nicole Martin, National Park Service, Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, which quotes the 1851 manumission, the Oregon Spectator of September 2, 1851, and Major John S. Hatheway's letter of May 1, 1851; a work of the United States government in the public domain.
I dessa publikationerFort Vancouver National Historic Site
Licens: CC0 1.0 (allmän egendom) · Bearbetat efter www.nps.gov
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