Meet Sarah Campbell
This is an edited version of an earlier Facebook post from when I lived and worked in South Dakota. I was greatly inspired by this woman, and felt her story was worth revisiting.
Meet Sarah Campbell.
In 1825, when Sarah was twelve, her presumptive father gave her freedom from her slavery upon his death, but somehow that didn't come to pass. She was sold, then her labor was leased out to another, to work on a steamboat on the Missouri River. When she was fourteen, she met a lawyer on this same steamboat. She mentioned to him that she had been freed, but was somehow still enslaved. This lawyer told her that because the Dakota Territory was not part of the slaveholding Union, she should be free anyway, and he wrote a petition to the court asking specifically for her freedom and damages for her continued enslavement after she had legally been freed. An elite passenger on a steamboat on the Missouri River stuck his neck out for a working-class kid who was well beneath him in class and social stature of the times. Wow. Just wow! On his petition, she was GRANTED her freedom by a US court of law (but was only given one cent for damages). She was granted her freedom. Her freedom. What a remarkable thing. Just freaking WOW!
I want to be crystal clear here. Dred Scott went all the way to the Supreme Court in March of 1857 (Dred Scott v. John F.A. Sandford). Based on that specific court decision, it didn’t matter if one was in a non-slaveholding part of the country, if one was ever a slave, one was still a slave. Technically, she had been freed in 1825, but a huge part of the government’s decision to release her from her labor bonds was because she was living in a free territory in 1827. So, I’m not sure how such a thing came to pass, or how it wasn’t a precedent for the future Dred Scott decision, or why such things even mattered in the first place, but the thing to understand in all this is that she was granted her freedom. It was two years overdue according to the dying wishes of her father, & it was a lifetime overdue for a fourteen-year-old who was doing her best so far away from her native home in Kentucky, without the benefit of a parent or friend.
This now-free fourteen-year-old made her home in Bismarck, Dakota Territory (now North Dakota) and continued to work the steamboat line as a free person. While on that steamboat, she met and married a man named Campbell, and they had a child. Somehow along the way, she met a man (men?) in the 7th Cavalry, and hired on as the cook/laundress for George Custer and the entire 7th Cavalry in their excursion into the Black Hills in 1874. Under the Laramie Treaty, non-natives were not even supposed to be in this area. This might be a topic for further musing, but for now, understand that the United States signed a binding contract with indigenous people agreeing to keep the Black Hills under native control and exclude non-native people altogether. Then, almost immediately, the United States government reneged on that, and what happened when they did is a subject of our history books.
So, as I digressed from the point, please don’t forget where I’m going. Sarah Campbell was the first non-native woman ever in the Black Hills. Ever.
What makes this story SO amazing is that she went on to own five different mines in the Black Hills, one of which was an extremely successful silver mine she named Alice. She "retired" to owning a ranch near the mining town of Galena, South Dakota and was buried in the Vinegar Hill Cemetery there.
This enslaved child went on to be an owner of multiple businesses, in a time where very few women owned anything in their own right, and when the established part of our country was still reeling from the aftermath of the Civil War. She held her own in a rough-and-tough, wild-west territory that truly valued what you brought to the table as a human being, not as a woman or as a person of color, but as a human being.
Go Sarah, go! I'm so happy to have learned about you. I hope I can help your legacy inspire others. I know you were only living your life as you felt necessary, in a world that you didn’t understand and couldn’t control. You found your place in the “wild west” and showed the world what is real and true in all of us human beings. You weren’t trying to be a hero or a role model. That’s what makes your story so cool. I get it, that you just showed up for life and did the very best you could. That’s what we all need to know, right now. We could all learn a bit from you, Sarah. Thank you for just showing up for life. I feel privileged to have met you.
