James Beckwourth

For most descendants of African slaves born prior to the Civil War, the path to freedom was usually a covert and perilous foot journey to exile in the North. But for James Pierson Beckwourth, the trail blazed off the plantation and headed to the American West, into the Rocky Mountains, where he arrived as a fur trapper and, later, became an adopted member of the Crow Indians. Beckwourth was most likely born in 1800 (historians have disproven the April 6, 1798 date) into American slaver