Henry Ossian Flipper

Henry Ossian Flipper was the first African American graduate of West Point.  Upon commissioning as a second lieutenant, he was sent to the 10th Cavalry and was the first Black officer of the all-Black "Buffalo Soldiers."  He fought in the first Apache Wars before his discharge for financial improprieties, which on investigation are more than curious.  He was posthumously pardoned by President Bill Clinton more than 100 years after his discharge.

In Stones from the Creek, a fictional Flipper appears as the protagonist of the story "Passion Flower" under the name "the Engineer."  He appears in his own name in "The Sun Shone So Brightly" as the aloof and unavailable mine superintendent and in "White Caps" as the surveyor hired by the US Marshal.  And, like several other characters, he reflects on the unfairness of Mingo Sanders's ("Wade in the Water," "Scars") discharge after the Brownsville, Texas incident.  For the fictional Flipper, though, it creates a wounding reminder of his own discharge.

The real Flipper was deeply involved in the events surrounding "White Caps" and "Warrior Princess."  His translations of the Spanish legal code regarding land grants permitted the US Supreme Court to decide in US v. SANDOVAL, 167 U.S. 278 (1897) that community lands were actually "crown" lands, and that the federal government should, therefore, take over most of the property of the Mexican communities of New Mexico.  I cannot overstate how important this decision was in transforming New Mexico.  He was also involved in surveying and operating copper mines on both sides of the border, like those in "The Sun Shone So Brightly."

The short memoir and letters published under the title Black Frontiersman should really be exciting.  But their mundanity and emphasis on the very personal are interesting nevertheless.  Is the reader (i.e., me) interested in Flipper's feelings about helping to confiscate community lands from the Mexicans of the southwest?  Flipper instead wants to relate how he felt about sitting in the Supreme Court while the Sandoval arguments took place without being recognized.

Is the reader interested in the gigantic Cananea Strike of 1906, in which thousands of Mexicans struck the copper mines of William C. Greene?  Flipper wants to describe how he fed all of Greene's millionaire friends from New York when they visited Mexico, and how he sat at the head of the table.  He is particularly interested in another engineer's wife, with a tattoo of a snake on her upper arm, which he accidentally saw.

I won't belabor this point.  It is enough to say they we learn about each important person who treated Flipper with courtesy, and about the bad end that came of several people who snubbed him.  We learn about the niece of Jefferson Davis who cooked for him and waited on him at table and cleaned up after him.  We learn nothing of his views on the discharge of infantrymen after the so-called Brownsville "Raid" other than that they did not join Pancho Villa's revolutionaries.  (There was a rumor going around in 1916 that he was a prominent Villista, which he found extremely insulting:  "I have not lost my five senses.")

My fictional Flipper volunteered to serve the US Army in Cuba in 1898.  So did the real Flipper, by means of a telegram that went unanswered.  We learn about that, as we do his unsatisfactory visit to President McKinley.

I think it is safe to say that Henry O. Flipper does not make a satisfactory progressive hero.  But he is no less interesting for that.  Below see the front cover of a published version of his memoir along with a photo of William Greene and the strikers at Cananea.