SOURCE: "Oscar Micheaux: The Melting Pot on the Plains," in The Old Northwest: A Journal of Regional Life and Letters, Vol. 2, September, 1976, pp. 299-307.

In the following essay, Elder examines the historical information contained in Micheaux's published works about the westward expansion of the United States.

When the Department of the Interior opened up land on the eastern part of the Rosebud Reservation in Gregory County, South Dakota, in 1905, the most unusual homesteader to stake his claim was the young Afro-American, Oscar Micheaux, a former Pullman porter from Illinois. Micheaux's ambition and daring seem to have fascinated his German, Swedish, Irish, Assyrian, Russian, Danish, and Austrian neighbors; there can be no doubt that he was deeply involved in his own accomplishments. He told of his homesteading experience in an autobiography, The Conquest, the Story of a Negro Pioneer (1913), and again in two novels, The Homesteader (1917) and The Wind...