Color Blind: The Forgotten Team That Broke Baseball's Color Line

By Tom Dunkel

“One of the great untold stories about baseball history, one that almost sounds too good to be true.” —Chicago Tribune
 
A 2013 CASEY Award Finalist for Best Baseball Book of the Year
 
When baseball swept America in the years after the Civil War, independent, semipro, and municipal leagues sprouted up everywhere. With civic pride on the line, rivalries were fierce and teams often signed ringers to play alongside the town dentist, insurance salesman, and teen prodigy. In drought-stricken Bismarck, North Dakota during the Great Depression, one of the most improbable teams in the history of baseball was assembled by one of the sport’s most unlikely champions. A decade before Jackie Robinson broke into the Major Leagues, car dealer Neil Churchill signed the best players he could find, regardless of race, and fielded an integrated squad that took on all comers in spectacular fashion.
 
Color Blind immerses the reader in the wild and wonderful world of early independent baseball, with its tough competition and its novelty. Dunkel traces the rise of the Bismarck squad, focusing on the 1935 season and the first National Semipro Tournament. This is an entertaining, must-read for anyone interested in the history of baseball.
 
“A tale as fantastic as it is true.” —The Boston Globe
 
“It is funny, it is sad, it is spellbinding, required reading for anyone who loves baseball, who loves a vivid story well-told.” —Philadelphia Daily News

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 2, 2013
• ISBN: 9780802193452

Book preview

Color Blind

Color Blind

THE FORGOTTEN TEAM

THAT BROKE BASEBALL’S

COLOR LINE

Tom

Dunkel

V-1.tif

Grove Press

New York

Copyright © 2013 by Tom Dunkel

Cover design by Nim Ben-Reuven

Cover photograph:baseball © Frances Pharr

Author photograph by Jim Burger

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Shuffle Off to Buffalo (from 42nd Street)

Lyrics by Al Dubin. Music by Harry Warren. Copyright © 1932 (Renewed) WB Music

Corp. Print rights controlled and administered by Alfred Publishing Co., Inc. All Rights

Reserved. Used by Permission.

Bye Bye Blackbird

from PETE KELLY’S BLUES

Lyric by Mort Dixon

Music by Ray Henderson

© 1926 (Renewed 1953) Olde Clover Leaf Music (ASCAP)/Administered

by Bug Music, Inc., a BMG Chrysalis company and RAY HENDERSON (ASCAP)/­

Administered by RAY HENDERSON MUSIC

All Rights Reserved Used by Permission

Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation

Moonglow

Words and Music by Will Hudson, Eddie DeLange, and Irving Mills

Copyright © 1934 EMI Mills Music, Inc., New York

Copyright Renewed, Assigned to EMI Mills Music, Inc. and Scarsdale Music Corporation,

New York for the United States

All Rights outside the United States Controlled by EMI Mills Music, Inc.

International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved

Used by Permission

Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation

Honey and Salt

Copyright © 1963 by Carl Sandburg and renewed 1991 by Margaret Sandburg, Helga

Sandburg Crile, and Janet Sandburg. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin

­Harcourt Publishing Co. All Rights Reserved.

Printed in the United States of America

Published simultaneously in Canada

ISBN: 978-0-8021-2137-0

eISBN: 978-0-8021-9345-2

Grove Press

an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

154 West 14th Street

New York, NY 10011

Distributed by Publishers Group West

www.groveatlantic.com

Aren’t you done with that book yet? she would ask, almost weekly.

It must be a long book.

For Mom, who pitched a perfect game into the ninth inning

of her life, but missed this Opening Day.

And is there anything that can tell more about

an American summer than, say, the smell of

the wooden bleachers in a small-town baseball park,

the resinous, sultry, and exciting smell of old dry wood.

—Thomas Wolfe

Be an opener of doors for such as come after thee.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

CONTENTS

Preface: Before 42

Part One: Coming Together

1 Prairieland of Opportunity

2 Grasshoppers and Hickory Sticks

3 Birth of a Salesman

4 Worlds Apart

5 Over the Color Line

6 Throwing Fire

7 Showtime

8 Nameless Dread

Part Two: Playing Together

9 Come and Gone

10 Feeling the Heat

11 Marriages and Separations

12 Cat and Moose

13 Long Rifle Rides Again

14 A Riotous Opera of Extra-Base Hits . . .

Part Three: Tested Together

15 Little Man, Big Idea

16 Gunfight at the Cowtown Corral

17 Big Gun

18 The Erle of Oklahoma

19 Last Team Standing

20 Plenty of Barn Room

21 Endings

22 Deep Smoke Winding

Acknowledgments

A Note on Sources

Notes

Index

Preface

Before 42

On April 15, 1947, a corner of the earth shook: to be precise, a grimy corner of Flatbush Avenue in the borough of Brooklyn, New York. That chilly afternoon, Jackie Roosevelt Robinson—son of a sharecropper and grandson of a slave; the coal-black ballplayer who, in the words of writer Roger Kahn, burned with a dark fire—put on a white wool shirt with Dodgers emblazoned across the chest in royal blue. On his back: number 42.

The United States that April was a nation cleaved in half. Segregated restrooms, whites-only restaurants, poll taxes, and voter literacy tests were the law across much of the land. A person of color who wanted to attend a Major League baseball game in Saint Louis had to sit in a designated section of the right field bleachers. It would be another year before President Harry Truman integrated the military, seven years until the Supreme Court drove a stake through the heart of separate-but-equal education. Due to baseball’s status as then-undisputed heavyweight champ of all sports, the mere act of Robinson donning the same uniform as twenty-four Caucasian teammates was freighted with significance. Mixed-race baseball represented a prying open of the American Dream, a peek at the prospect of full citizenship for all. Far from New York, people took note. An editorial writer at Wisconsin’s unheralded Manitowoc Herald-Times felt compelled to sit down at his typewriter and peck away: It is to baseball’s credit that one of the highest walls in the way of real liberation of the Negro has been breached. One of the last and most uncompromising camps of those who adhere to the dogma of white supremacy has been captured. Good Luck, Jackie Robinson.

Not everyone shared those sentiments. Robinson endured innumerable taunts and death threats that season, stoically playing on. By doing so, he and Brooklyn Dodgers General Manager Branch Rickey, the bow-tie-wearing mastermind of this so-called great experiment, together erased baseball’s color line. Robinson’s legacy is such that in March 1984 he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, putting him in the heady company of Jonas Salk, Martha Graham, General Omar Bradley, Martin Luther King Jr., and the other select few overachievers who’ve received the nation’s highest civilian honor. In a White House ceremony, President Ronald Reagan said Robinson struck a mighty blow for equality, freedom, and the American way of life. Major League Baseball not only inducted him into the Hall of Fame but took the unprecedented step of retiring number 42 on every team—its way of paying eternal tribute to the shattering of a seemingly impregnable wall of exclusion.

After Robinson crossed the line, obstacles outside baseball soon began to fall as well: in the courts, in the classroom, at the lunch counter. Those barriers had cracks in them prior to 1947, some large enough for men and women to squeeze through, often without fanfare though rarely without some attendant risk. One group of athletes defied the norms of their sport and their society just like Jackie Robinson; but they did it back in the 1930s, when he was still in high school. They played on a color-blind baseball team: half black, half white. They wore the baggy uniforms then considered fashionable. They swung heavy, thick-handled bats perhaps better suited for beating rugs. They fielded with primitive gloves that were just a cut above barbecue mitts. But their team photo could have been taken yesterday.

These were time travelers of a sort, ambassadors from the multiracial future. It might have made more sense for them to have arrived by rocket ship from another planet. Instead, they gravitated one by one to a baseball diamond scratched into the dark soil of the Great Plains, some 1,500 miles from Brooklyn. Out where wheat waves and cornstalks reach for the sky, it was as if a mysterious hand had planted some magic seeds—seeds that would grow to produce a crop of ballplayers the likes of which this country had never seen.

PART ONE

COMING TOGETHER

1

Prairieland

of Opportunity

The theme of the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago was A Century of Progress and during its extended run 48 million people poured through the turnstiles. So much to see: that odd rear-engine automobile, pink-cheeked babies snoozing in incubators, a Televisor contraption that—Honey, can you believe this?—displayed moving pictures beamed from remote locations. So much to do: walk through a facsimile Belgian village, take a spin in the Sky Ride cable cars, sample Miracle Whip dressing dispensed by Kraft Food’s newly patented emulsifying machine. The World’s Fair offered the masses a glimpse of a bright future personified by Westinghouse Electric’s Willie the Robot. Bark a command into the telephone receiver by Willie’s side and he would obediently shake your hand, stand up, sit down, even smoke a cigarette.

Unfortunately, when the gates closed at day’s end too many fairgoers had to leave behind the wondrous, glass-walled House of Tomorrow and return home to the wearisome reality of the Great Depression: leftovers again for supper and unpaid bills piling high. One in four Americans had no job in 1933. Large swaths of the country were backsliding from industrial-age splendor into crippled-­economy squalor. An editor at the Chicago Tribune decided his fellow citizens could use a pick-me-up diversion. He proposed a special sporting event held in conjunction with the Century of Progress, a midsummer exhibition in which the best baseball players from the American and National leagues would square off and do battle. On July 6, Chicago’s Comiskey Park hosted a one-time-only All-Star Game and 47,595 people purchased tickets. The American League prevailed, 4–2, thanks in part to a two-run homer swatted by the New York Yankees’ irrepressible Babe Ruth. Having surpassed the rosiest of expectations, the All-Star Game became an annual affair. (That home-run ball Ruth deposited in the right field bleachers at Comiskey sold at auction in 2006 for $805,000.)

Three weeks after the All-Star festivities, twenty-year-old Quincy Troupe boarded a Lockheed Orion single-engine airplane at Chicago Municipal Airport. The Orion was a puddle jumper, holding just six passengers plus sacks of mail.c Troupe had a man’s body, with 210 pounds of muscle drawn tight on his six-foot-three-inch frame, but the lingering boy in him was betrayed by a cherubic baby face. He had never been on a plane before. A friend recommended a stiff highball as a cure for his jitters. Troupe had never taken a drink of alcohol before. Anxiety trumped his Christian upbringing and he sipped a preflight cocktail. Around midnight the tiny plane taxied down the runway and angled skyward, bound for a stopover in Minneapolis, then a quick hop to Bismarck, North Dakota. Troupe carried with him a small leather case. It contained his ukulele. His first spare moment in Bismarck he intended to buy sheet music for a new song he’d heard, a melancholy ballad called Moonglow that Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington would eventually grab hold of and turn into dueling hit records:

It must have been moonglow, way up in the blue

It must have been moonglow that led me straight to you.

Quincy Troupe wasn’t a traveling musician. He was a professional baseball player: a black professional baseball player, which meant he wasn’t going to be appearing in an All-Star Game anytime soon. There were gaping holes in the Century of Progress when it came to race relations. To be black in America was to be a second-class citizen at best and, in some corners, viewed as less ­human than Willie the Robot. Baseball contorted itself like the rest of society, functioning as an agent of unspoken apartheid. The major and minor leagues had been purely white enterprises for nearly fifty years. Up until that morning, Troupe was a switch-hitting backup catcher for the Chicago American Giants of the Negro National League. The book on him was that he had a good head for the game, plus a bazooka arm and lively bat. Raw meat, but grade A. On top of that—sportswriters, beware—he was a Golden Gloves boxer.

In June the Chicago American Giants had gone on the road to face the Pittsburgh Crawfords. The Giants’ second baseman was hurt, so Troupe filled in for him and got the nod to play both ends of a Saturday doubleheader. The bad news was that the Crawfords’ starting pitcher for game two that afternoon happened to be Satchel Paige. There arguably was no one better in all of baseball, black or white. Paige had a whooping crane’s physique and an unorthodox high-kick delivery, but he threw with supernatural ferocity. A teammate once remarked that trying to catch his fastball was like catching a bullet.

Satchel Paige was roughly in his mid-twenties, part of the Paige mystique being a missing birth certificate and his uncertain age. Already hailed as king of the Negro Leagues, he was still a legend in the making. Paige brought to the mound a jazz musician’s flair for improvisation and showmanship: Louis Armstrong in spikes. He drew upon a dizzying array of pitches, mostly variations on a head-of-the-class fastball and a good-enough-to-get-by curve. He gave them nicknames as if they were old friends, which they were: Be Ball, Jump Ball, Trouble Ball, Nothin’ Ball, Wobbly Ball, Hurry-Up Ball, Bat Dodger, and Two-Hoop Blooper, not to mention his signature Hesitation Pitch, in which Paige’s body would momentarily freeze mid-motion, confounding hitters. Nearly every batter dreaded having to stand in against Ol’ Satch. Quincy Troupe showed no fear in Pittsburgh. He made an out his first at bat, but the second time up pulverized a knee-high fastball. It cleared the right field fence as if shot from a cannon, ricocheting off the side of Memorial Hospital, more than 400 feet from home plate.

Paige stared in disbelief as the boy catcher circled the bases. Legends are seldom stunned into silence.

That night Troupe dined at the Crawford Grill, a restaurant owned by Gus Greenlee, Pittsburgh’s high-profile rogue and ­highest-profile black man. The Grill was more than a restaurant. It was an all-purpose pleasure palace with a busy bar, a live-­entertainment nightclub, and upstairs rooms where love could be discreetly bought and sold. Greenlee also managed a stable of boxers (notably light-heavyweight champion John Henry Lewis) and presided over a thriving numbers racket, all of which had provided him the disposable income to buy the Crawfords baseball team. A big man who puffed big cigars, Gus Greenlee was something of a Robin Hood figure in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. A shady character to be sure, but one who employed hundreds of people, ran soup lines, and gave generously to hospitals and the NAACP. Black athletes and fans flocked to his Grill after games. No surprise, then, when Satchel Paige also stopped by for a bite to eat that evening. He broke into a grin upon spotting the youngster who’d cracked the wall-banger home run off him.

What’s your name? Paige inquired, not that he’d remember. He had total command of his pitches, but people’s names flummoxed him. He solved that problem by calling almost everybody Bo’.

Quincy Troupe, Troupe answered softly, nerves jangling.

"I shouldn’t ever forget that name after what happened today!" Paige bellowed, playing to the cluster of teammates and hangers-on who, as usual, were cruising in his wake. He cackled, then lowered his voice, turning uncharacteristically avuncular.

I’ve got a tip for you, Quincy, said Paige. You can go a long way in this game if you just listen to what the other players tell you. Don’t be a know-it-all, take it easy with the girls, and lay off the liquor.

This was odd counsel coming from Satch, a man with a hard-earned reputation for living large and bending every rule that ever got in his way. He was no stranger to a stiff highball. Troupe, on the other hand, had the demeanor of a lifelong Eagle Scout: diligent, modest, and polite almost to a fault. I’m more than grateful and thankful for the advice, Troupe replied, swooning inside. The great Satchel Paige had gone out of his way to impart wisdom to a kid opponent. To him! Troupe immediately placed the lanky pitcher upon a pedestal from which he would never tumble.

That home run in Pittsburgh proved to be the highlight of Troupe’s tenure with the Chicago American Giants. In truth, there weren’t many big moments from which to choose. He was glued to the bench, a callow understudy to an older, established catcher who would sit out a game every week or so to rest his achy legs. Limited playing time wasn’t Troupe’s only frustration. Like a lot of Negro League teams, the Giants had financial difficulties. These were hard times. A couple of Troupe’s paychecks had been delayed. As a result, his ears pricked up shortly after that Pittsburgh road trip when someone told him about a baseball opportunity worth investigating. In Nowhere, North Dakota.

Quincy Troupe—the youngest of ten children—was unique in his own way, just as Satchel Paige and Babe Ruth were in theirs. The closest he came to cussing was doggone, and he wrote letters home to his mother in Saint Louis on a steady basis—almost saintly behavior for a pro ballplayer. Although city bred, there was a touch of hayseed in him and a lot of mama’s boy. He’d begun baseball life playing for his hometown heroes, the Negro League’s St. Louis Stars. That team also had money troubles. In the waning days of the 1931 season Troupe’s teammates on the Stars sent him to inquire about the possibility of getting paid their overdue wages, partly just to see if the rookie would be gullible enough to actually do it. Dick Kent had risen from shoeshine boy to co-owner of the Stars. He also was the sole owner of several cab companies and a black newspaper, the St. Louis American. He didn’t get that far on personality.

Troupe tapped on Kent’s office door. The boss opened up and glared at him. What you want, boy?

Sir, the fellows asked me to come for the balance you owe us, Troupe meekly responded.

Kent calmly walked over to his desk, slid open a drawer, and pulled out a gun. You young bastard, he growled, waving the pistol for effect. I’ll whip your head flat if you say another word about money! End of conversation. Also the end of the St. Louis Stars. Within a few days the players walked away and the team ceased operations.

It was now two years later and Quincy Troupe, marginally wiser in the ways of the world, sat gazing out the window of a pipsqueak airplane. Down below the twinkle of Chicago faded to black; stockyards, the Loop, and a whole city of big shoulders were swallowed by the night. He had signed on with a semipro team in Bismarck, in the process swapping office towers for grain silos, trading the glare of neon for the glimmer of a million stars. Team manager Neil Churchill was an automobile dealer with a runaway passion for baseball. And baseball, Troupe would soon learn, provided a welcome outlet for community pride in Depression-battered North Dakota. It was the weapon of choice for grudge matches between rival towns, such an integral part of civic life that Troupe didn’t have to pay for his plane ticket. Northwest Airways provided complimentary transportation as a goodwill gesture to Bismarck baseball fans. Keep the faith. Help was on the way.

It’s impossible to be half pregnant, but to play semiprofessional baseball was another matter, though almost as oxymoronic. Up until about World War II, the pro-amateur dividing line could be nonsensically blurry. Churchill had visions of building a powerhouse lineup capable of holding its own against the best minor league teams, and maybe a few in the Major Leagues. That kind of quality building material didn’t exist in North Dakota. Finding premium ballplayers would require thinking outside the box, outside the state. Outside the northern European, family-farm gene pool. To that end, he’d begun cherry-picking players from the struggling Negro Leagues. This was Neil Churchill’s emulsifying machine, if you will: an efficacious blending of black and white, Miracle Whip baseball. God knows what cash cow he was milking. Churchill didn’t pinch pennies. He offered Troupe $175 a month, $35 above what he made with the Chicago American Giants. What’s more, he guaranteed Troupe the starting catcher’s position. Churchill told a Bismarck Tribune reporter he’d landed the black Babe Ruth. That was the car salesman in him talking: no-money-down, zero-percent-financing hyperbole. Troupe knew it, even if Tribune readers did not. He had yet to prove himself on a ball field day in, day out. This would be his chance.

The money was good. Yet money alone couldn’t lure a twenty-year-old black man to one of the whitest, poorest states in America. It took something more visceral and magnetic: true love. No woman crooked a finger and gave Quincy Troupe that sly, come-hither stare. He was flying west, through the darkness and into the dawn, primarily for the joy of playing baseball, that notorious heartbreaker of a game.

It must have been moonglow, way up in the blue

It must have been moonglow that led me straight to you

I still hear you sayin’, Dear one, hold me fast.

And I keep on prayin’, Oh, Lord, please make this last.

2

Grasshoppers and

Hickory Sticks

Bismarck clings to the eastern bank of the Missouri River, positioned just below the midsection of North Dakota, about where a belly button would be if the state had one. It’s the capital and, according to the 1930 census, had 11,090 residents: huge by Great Plains standards, but not enough bodies to fill Chicago’s Comiskey Park to a quarter of capacity. Mandan sits on the western side of the Missouri, directly across from Bismarck and less than half the size: its blue-collar, tomboy sister city. When John Steinbeck drove across the country in 1960, gathering material for the book that would become Travels with Charley, this run of the Missouri River bowled him over. Here is where the map should fold. Here is the boundary between east and west, he wrote. On the Bismarck side it is eastern landscape, eastern grass, with the look and smell of eastern America. Across the Missouri on the Mandan side, it is pure west, with brown grass and water scorings and small outcrops. The two sides of the river might well be a thousand miles apart.

Geography played a key role in selection of the government seat. In addition to being centrally located, Bismarck had river and rail access. Geography also played a role in perception. People farther east—residents of Jamestown, Grand Forks, Fargo, and Valley City—felt a kinship with Minneapolis–Saint Paul. They fancied themselves urbane, envisioning the map of North Dakota almost as stages in the evolution of man. The smaller, unrefined burgs sprinkled along the Missouri Slope that ran west of Bismarck—Minot, Dickinson, Williston, Glen Ullin, and other incorporated miseries—figuratively scurried on all fours. Bismarck was a knuckle-dragging hybrid, the gateway to the frontier. Towns nearest Minnesota, so the logic went, walked blessedly upright.

North Dakota entered the union in 1889 as a dry state, an issue that split along the lines of dominant ethnic groups. Those of dour Norwegian ancestry generally favored Prohibition. Those of German or Russian extraction enjoyed lifting the occasional glass. The dries were led by Elizabeth Preston Anderson, a whirlwind scold who became a Woman’s Christian Temperance Union activist in the 1880s and would stalk the halls of the state legislature for almost fifty years. Mrs. Anderson didn’t confine her crusading to demon rum. She successfully lobbied for laws that criminalized prostitution, gambling, and Sunday baseball. Her more liberal side advocated on behalf of child labor laws and women’s suffrage. Thus the tightly corseted heart of Elizabeth Preston Anderson harbored some of the dichotomy that animated North Dakota, where progressive prairie populism tried to peacefully coexist with Bible-based conservatism. Praise Jesus! But let us also give thanks for the grain co-op.

The temperance lobby wielded a heavy hammer in North Dakota even after Prohibition ended in December 1933 with passage of the Twenty-First Amendment. Beer made an immediate comeback in the state (though judiciously watered down to the level of 3.2 percent alcohol), but it would take another three years for hard liquor sales to become legal. Some counties stayed dry until 1947, and a few towns lasted into the 1980s. That’s not to say drinkers stood idly by, abstaining. Moonshine had a long tradition of flowing as wild and as free as the mighty Missouri. Millions of gallons with syndicate connections seeped out of Minnesota or poured across the Canadian border. Minot, a straight highway shoot from Saskatchewan, got dubbed Little Chicago. In 1910 an illicit gin mill got busted in Mandan. It was being run by the police commissioner. Do-it-yourselfers everywhere stoked basement and backyard stills. When Fargo authorities raided one such loaded home, the local paper poetically remarked it was equipped to turn out 30 gallons of bliss and forgetfulness each 24 hours. North Dakota had enough moonshine action that federal agents set up shop inside the Bismarck post office.

In the 1930s twin bridges arced over the wide Missouri, connecting Bismarck and Mandan. One bridge handled trains; the other, cars and trucks. Theoretically, that’s how traffic moved. ­Under cover of darkness, however, the boldest of bootleggers would let the air out of their car tires, flip off their headlights, and bounce along the rail ties, praying a locomotive wasn’t barreling down the same track at exactly the same time. Hooch business was especially good along the Strip, an unincorporated buffer between the river and Mandan proper. It was chockablock with pool halls, dance clubs, and blind pigs, the colorful patois for speakeasies. In those days the Missouri River served as a demarcation line separating the Central and Mountain time zones. If you lived in Bismarck, there always was a bonus hour of late-night fun to be had on the Strip. The populace took full advantage.

North Dakota had other rough edges. The Heart River fed into the Missouri on the outskirts of Mandan. Dams had yet to be built that would control river flow. Long after spring thaw, the narrow, twisting Heart remained treacherous. Swimmers liked to ride the currents, but did so at their peril. Drownings were common. Bodies sometimes bloated and then sank before they could be retrieved. The sheriff’s department would attempt to dislodge those corpses with controlled drops of dynamite. John Sakariassen grew up in Mandan in the 1930s and never forgot the eerie blasts that punctuated his childhood. It would happen a couple of times a summer, he says. When you heard that booming, you thought, ‘Oh, my gosh, I wonder who drowned?’ Because it was a small town and everybody knew everybody.

Water posed another kind of threat: periodically not enough fell from the sky. Between 1929 and 1939, North Dakota endured nine years of below-average precipitation. In 1936, less than 9 inches of rain was recorded. Crops wilted with numbing regularity. The prolonged drought produced epic dust storms. Drifts of desertlike sand buried barbed-wire fences, allowing livestock to roam at will. Cattle lucky enough to escape dehydration choked on dust.

The Depression hit the Great Plains in the early 1920s, ahead of the rest of the country, which had the luxury of marinating in prosperity a few extra years. North Dakota historian Elwyn Robinson observed that the state had a tragic habit of repeating what he called the too-much mistake—perhaps a by-product of its land-grant roots and buoyant pioneer spirit. Whatever its genesis, Robinson detected a pattern of gluttonous growth and raging ambition that frequently lead to a humbling comeuppance. Such was the case in the Depression. Farms expanded too fast, fueled by easy credit. Overproduction eventually caused crop prices to crash, triggering a foreclosure epidemic.

All that played out against the backdrop of a drought-and-dust weather cycle. Then came the kidney punch: a biblical invasion of grasshoppers that flourished in the arid, windy climate. The infiltration began in the spring of 1931 and didn’t abate for nearly a decade. At their worst in the mid-1930s, hoppers covered more than two-thirds of the state. Bugs as much as four inches deep squirmed over the landscape, nibbling wash hanging on clotheslines, congealing in airborne swarms that blocked the sun and caused streetlights to flick on at midday. Living conditions were every bit as bleak as in Oklahoma, poster child of the Dust Bowl.

Meriwether Lewis and William Clark slept here. In November 1804 the two explorers and their Corps of Discovery mates pushed deep into the Missouri River valley. There they hunkered down for the winter, felling trees and erecting a temporary encampment about forty-five miles north of the spot that would someday be the city of Bismarck. A tribe of Mandan Indians befriended the newcomers, showing them how to secure food and keep warm as temperatures nosedived to forty degrees below zero. Captain Clark noted in his journal, more Cold than I thought it possible for man to endure. Had the Mandan been able to foresee what complications whites would bring to the virgin West, they might have let Lewis and Clark fumble around till they collapsed in a frostbitten heap. As it was, the Indians provided more than butternut squash and succor. Sakakawea, nineteenth-century go-to girl, went a step further (make that several thousand steps further) and guided the expedition onward to the Pacific Ocean. Others followed in the Corps of Discovery’s footprints. Trappers and fur traders materialized, then adventurers such as ornithologist John James Audubon. He wandered up the Missouri in 1843, listening to the hoofbeats of buffalo for miles on end roaring like the long continued roll of a hundred drums.

The drums were doomed to fall silent. The year 1873 was pivotal. That June the inaugural Northern Pacific Railway train chugged into Edwinton, a scrappy settlement that had taken root along the Missouri River. A month later the town fathers decided to adopt a new name in honor of the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who’d never set foot upon the continent. The switch to Bismarck was a railroad-engineered marketing ploy. The hope was that von Bismarck would be flattered and, for some inexplicable reason, elect to show his gratitude by funding the continued expansion of train service in North America. The chancellor didn’t bite. But the townfolk opted to remain Bismarck even without the benefit of his largesse, and the Northern Pacific executives managed to tap other sources of capital. Navvies laid more track, creeping deeper into Indian land.

The federal government felt obliged to protect railroad crews that were the vanguard of westward migration. In 1872 Fort Abraham Lincoln sprang up five miles south of Bismarck. Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer soon arrived with six companies of the dashing Seventh Cavalry. In the summer of 1874 Custer led a large show-of-force reconnaissance mission. They traversed 833 miles of the Black Hills (terrain that lies within present-day Wyoming and South Dakota) in sixty days, ostensibly scouting locations for additional outposts. There was, however, an ulterior motive: to confirm rumors that gold had been discovered. Indeed, it had. Custer sent word back to Fort Lincoln: I have on my table forty or fifty small particles of pure gold . . . most of it obtained today from one panful of earth.

The fledgling Bismarck Tribune breathlessly covered the news. Headline writers seemed to be in competition to outdo one another. Gold and Silver in Immense Quantities. Anybody Can Find It. No Former Experience Required. The Most Beautiful Valleys the Eye of Man Ever Rested Upon. An Eden and an Eldorado. Held by the Hostile Sioux but Not Occupied. In short order gold was selling for $20 an ounce in Bismarck, which became a popular departure point for manic miners heading to the Hills on their own or by stagecoach. Hotels bulged with guests. The honky-tonk good times rolled at O’Neill’s Dance Hall, Jack Champion’s Dance Hall, Seventh Cavalry Saloon, and Hole in the Wall Saloon. Bismarck joined the ranks of boomtowns where dreamers, do-gooders, and the depraved tend to converge. The combination of railroad, river, and gold fever made for a rough-and-tumble, transient culture. Before the Presbyterians had a brick-and-mortar church, they held services in a downtown tent that housed a gambling den Monday morning through Saturday night. The collection plate runneth over with poker chips. The intersection of Fourth and Main Streets attracted colorful, questionable characters who could have stepped off the pages of a dime-store western novel. Big Mary. Bejesus Lize. Thums Up. Short and Dirty. Very few pillars of the community frequented that neighborhood, which acquired the disquieting sobriquet Murderers’ Gulch. The fun at O’Neill’s Dance Hall alone was disrupted by seven killings.

A physical inventory taken around that time provided a snapshot of early Bismarck. There were 112 private residences being served by one rail depot, two steamboat offices, three churches, three bathhouses, four blacksmiths, four dance halls, eight hotels, and 36 saloons. Kate Templeton Jewell, whose husband, Marshall, was editor of the Bismarck Tribune, decided that security provided by the military amounted to a net loss. It gave comfort to reprobates. With the advent of the 7th Cavalry at Fort Lincoln, she said, the character of Bismarck changed materially for the worse. Custer might have concurred. One morning he and two companies of the Seventh Cavalry paid a call on the mayor. They were looking to recover shipments of grain stolen from the fort and believed to be stashed in town. The mayor must have known something. Custer returned to Fort Lincoln with the missing supplies and also several suspected thieves, who were tossed into the guardhouse—and promptly escaped.

Gold forever changed frontier dynamics. The U.S. government abandoned all intent, and ultimately any pretense, of abiding by a treaty that had given the Sioux, the Cheyenne, and scattered other tribes control over vast swaths of the Great Plains. In May 1876 Colonel Custer and 1,200 troops took leave of Fort Lincoln, bound for rolling grasslands several hundred miles away that surrounded the Little Big Horn River. They intended to rein in Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, two tribal chiefs who’d lost patience with white interlopers. Well-wishers from Bismarck and Mandan came to bid them godspeed. A regimental band played The Girl I Left Behind Me as lines of blue soldiers rode off to oblivion.

Mark Kellogg, a Bismarck Tribune reporter doing double duty as a stringer for papers back east, accompanied the Seventh Cavalry. He had the misfortune to be astride a mule, and this may explain why he was among the earliest of the 268 fatalities. The dead included, most famously, Custer and everyone in the five companies under his immediate command, all of whom trotted into the teeth of Sitting Bull’s trap. Kellogg is recognized as the first Associated Press correspondent to die covering a story. There was some benefit to being a civilian. Many of the bodies at the Little Big Horn were horribly mutilated. Kellogg got off comparatively easy. He was found scalped and missing only one ear.

Also killed at the Battle of the Little Big Horn was Private William Davis, third baseman for the Fort Lincoln baseball team.

The players called themselves Benteen’s Base Ball Club, a figurative tip of the hat to Captain Frederick Benteen, a high-ranking officer of the Seventh Cavalry. A soldier who served as recording secretary for the team had written a catty season preview for one of the Dakota Territory newspapers in February 1876. Private Davis didn’t impress him: Fair at the bat, slow runner, and he has the worst fault imaginable, wishing to play ‘fancy.’ Age 24. In baseball he is scarcely 14. Three other ballplayers deployed on the flanks at Custer’s Last Stand were wounded that fateful day: second baseman Private William Fatty Williams (prone to cry for vexation whenever an umpire called him out on strikes, the team secretary noted, which was often the case as the bat is Fatty’s weak point); utility man Private Charles Bishop (heavy hitter with the willow, but lazy); and Sergeant Joseph McCurry, ace pitcher (delivers a swift and correct ball; leaves the army next winter and will no doubt be engaged in some professional or first class amateur nine).

Alas, McCurry never pitched professionally.

Reviews for Color Blind

[vgaharris · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Intriguing story, gets off track a little but still very readable. One demerit for having no index, a flaw for a non-fiction book.

[nmele_4 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I am hesitant to give this book a starred rating, because it is a fascinating and enjoyable read but...like many baseball writers, Dunkel tends to digress from his theme by relating colorful, interesting, unusual baseball stories. Since Satchel Paige is one of his main characters, there are a lot of fascinating diversions, some of them familiar, some less so. But Dunkel's purpose is to talk about a Bismarck, ND, town team that integrated black and white semi-pro players in the 1930s. What is most fascinating about this is the context: black players had occasionally played with white players on various teams at levels below the major leagues but the 1930s was the period when segregation extended downward from the majors into semi-pro and amateur teams across America. Dunkel tells the story, but I wish there had been less of "and then Satchel did this" and more of how it felt to the black and white players on that Bismarck team to play together.