‘Bell’ may in fact have been poet-activist James Madison Bell.
A driving force in the protection of Yosemite Valley, and indeed the whole National Park System, was famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. The driving force behind Olmsted’s first look at Yosemite was the unsung “Bell”—a black man not otherwise described by name who was a mainstay of the 1864 expedition, serving as guide, cook, horse handler and freelance anthropologist. Olmsted’s first trip to Yosemite came on the heels of President Abraham Lincoln’s signing of a bill to withdraw Yosemite and the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoia trees from the public lands and deed them to the state of California. The actual congressional initiative came from U.S. Senator John Conness of California, but Olmsted—former head of the U.S. Sanitary Commission and already immersed in designing New York’s Central Park—is believed to have suggested or supported the bill. Later that year Olmsted was appointed chairman of the Yosemite Commission, charged with overseeing the grant, a duty that eventually prompted formation of the National Park Service.
The role of Bell was tangential but important. Variously described in Olmsted’s papers as a “black man” or a “Negro,” he served the otherwise all white expedition that included the Olmsted family; Mr. and Mrs. William Ashburner; the Olmsted’s English governess, Harriet Errington; and their German housemaid/nanny, Meta. Bell handled 10 horses, eight mules, two carriages and his 10 fellow travelers with no casualties to man or beast. The troupe arrived at the ranch of Galen Clark, whom Olmsted said “looked like the wandering Jew and talked like a professor of belles-lettres.” But Clark was dedicated to saving the Mariposa Grove and Yosemite from loggers, and he soon won over Olmsted and the other visitors to the cause. The men and boys rolled up in blankets under the open sky at night, while the ladies slept in tents. Errington, warned by friends that a lady over age 50 should not expose herself to such hardship, had the time of her life. Bell, the guide and cook, was the first person awake each morning, starting a fire and serving the party meals on a rough wooden table beneath one of the tents.
One morning Olmsted woke to a chorus of howlings in cadence that left him bewildered. He saw his sons wrapped up asleep in their blankets and the ever-reliable Bell tending the fire as usual. Bell, who had lived in rural California for some time, explained that the “Digger Indians” (Northern Paiutes) doing the singing were entirely peaceful, and that this incantation was part of their annual fish-poisoning ritual. As Olmsted and Bell watched, the Indians poisoned the stream of the South Fork with soapwort. The trout floated to the frothy surface belly up, and the Indian women hauled them in, pounded the fish into mush and cooked the pulverized meat in hollows in the rocks, using hot stones. Bell, at Olmsted’s request, talked the Indians into selling him several whole trout, though Olmsted observed, “They supply us with trout but are persuaded to do so with some difficulty, having already got more money from us than they care to lug about.”
Olmsted asked Bell what the Indians were saying during their ritual. As Olmsted recorded in his papers, Bell replied— perhaps with wry humor—what the Indian leader was telling his people:
Dey must be good Injuns and stick by dere tribe and be mighty kerful dey don’t do nothin’ that’ll be any good to anybody dat don’t belong to dar tribe…and when dey die a great wite bird wid his wings as long as from dat yer moutning to dat un, ’ll come and take um up to a big meadow war de clover heads don’t never dry up and dar’s lots of grasshoppers all de year roun.
Bell’s explanation, however, doesn’t match any recorded beliefs (most of which relate to health and incest taboos) of the nearly exterminated California Indians. It’s just possible he was spoofing the white Southern preachers who justified slavery. If so, Olmsted probably never realized it.
Bell, though, excelled at leading the Olmsted-Ash-burner party through Yosemite. Awed by the valley, Olmsted became a committed conservationist and returned there in 1865. But what of the mysterious guide on the 1864 trip (there is no record of him returning in 1865)? Nothing more is known of him—unless he was the same Bell who wrote poetry and had a connection to fiery abolitionist John Brown.
On May 8, 1858, a convention of nearly four dozen blacks and whites convened in Chatham, Canada, on the Thames River opposite Michigan. John Brown had called together abolitionists of both races to form the provisional government for a new republic comprised of soon-to-be liberated slaves. His host, and a delegate to the meeting, was James Madison Bell, a plasterer and sometime poet born in Ohio in 1826. Bell had attended a high school for blacks associated with Oberlin College, lived in Cincinnati, married and started a family, and become a committed abolitionist. Bell himself was freeborn, but he had relocated to Canada in 1854 in the midst of the Dred Scott case, which concluded with a U.S. Supreme Court decision that even free blacks could not be American citizens. At the Chatham convention— conducted under the cover story of forming a lodge for black Freemasons—Brown described his studies of guerrilla warfare in Haiti and proposed a war to rally blacks and those whites willing to risk their lives for the formation of a government wholly opposed to slavery. They would start by seizing the arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Va. (present-day Harpers Ferry, W.Va.).
Election results on the third day of the convention made black clergyman William Munroe president, Brown commander in chief and Dr. Martin Delany, an early proponent of black nationalism, corresponding secretary. When Brown explained his intent was not to bring about the dissolution of the federal union but to fulfill the ideal that black men and Indians were created equal, some of the black delegates found even this statement too moderate. Bell, though, helped raise money for Brown and introduced him to men without dependents who were willing recruits for what Southerners referred to as “servile insurrection”—punishable by death in the Southern states. Bell had a family, including an ailing wife, to think about and did not join Brown on his Harpers Ferry raid.
Brown’s October 1859 raid turned bloody, and it ended with the commonwealth of Virginia hanging Brown and six of his followers. Bell, who had probably said and done enough at the Chatham convention to face charges of treason, was not in the East when the Civil War broke out. In 1860 he had gone to San Francisco, where he remained active in the struggle for legal and financial emancipation. He worked to ensure equal education for the handful of black children then living in California, and he was a member and steward in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which had been founded in protest against slavery. Bell delivered his own poem in honor of John Brown during the first anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1864, and he was a member of the fourth California Colored Convention in 1865.
That year Bell left California, and in 1866 he returned his family from Canada to Ohio. He served as an Ohio delegate to the state Republican convention and as a delegate to the Republican National Conventions in 1868 and 1872. Bell supported the renomination of Ulysses S. Grant, a hero to the black community for winning the Civil War and, with the help of George Custer, dissolving the Ku Klux Klan.
James Madison Bell died in 1902, preceded by his wife and four of their seven children yet respected by the handful of people who remembered who he was. His poetry, marked by precise meter and rhyme and an elegant vocabulary, soon fell out of fashion. Or perhaps white critics didn’t expect black men to discuss cosmology or use the Middle English term “wight,” for “man,” to hold to a rhyme scheme.
Had it been James Madison Bell who met Frederick Law Olmsted—also a supporter of the Union and a critic of slavery—and introduced him to the glories of Yosemite? The poet-activist’s entry in American National Biography aptly states, “Very little has been written about Bell.” He is known to have worked as a plasterer in both Ohio and California while developing his style as a poet. His poems themselves, the vestiges of a forgotten career, bespeak a love of nature as rapturous as that of Olmsted or John Muir. Bell described Creation from “a shapeless, heterogenous mass” as a metaphor for the awakening of human consciousness. Muir said, more succinctly, that nature was a fine place in which to pray. Bell the guide’s use of allusion in his own wry but devout satire on the Southern churches that justified slavery is paralleled in Bell the poet’s lengthy work “The Modern Moses.” In that poem Bell compares President Andrew Johnson, whom Bell detested for his foot-dragging in enforcing civil rights, with President Lincoln, whom Bell venerated, and with Senator Charles Sumner, who took a caning on the Senate floor for denouncing slavery. Significantly, Bell never mentions Johnson by name, leaving it for the reader to discern. Perhaps he expected too much from his audience. Bell’s poetry survives as a collection of period pieces in obscure anthologies, but if James Madison Bell was the same “Bell” who guided Frederick Law Olmsted to Yosemite, he left a memorial more lasting than paper or bronze.
Originally published in the October 2014 issue of Wild West. To subscribe, click here.
