Old Missoula

A Recollection

Way back in time a few years before the turn of the last century a contingent of [African American] soldiers garrisoned the little frontier post, Fort Missoula, located near the then little city of Missoula.
In those days occasions for celebration were few and far between. Much attention was given to events that provided opportunity for community activities. Special days including national holidays were observed more generally and whole-heartedly than now.
As customary, even today, when military installations are conveniently located, military participation was solicited by the civilian community for special day observances. That quite naturally would be done in the case of a holiday such as the Fourth of July that had definite patriotic significance.
The highlight of such an event was the parade made up of available military units and organizations, civilian groups, Indians, rodeo performers, bands and any other talent that might add interest or color.
A makeshift reviewing stand usually marked the end of the marching route. A group of notables and near notables there awarded the accolades of the day and added their dignity along with the oratory suitable to the time and place.
Perhaps to the fort garrison the opportunity to take part in the celebration proceedings offered a welcome break in the tedium of routine activities.
One might assume that everything was “spit and polished” to the last degree, that nothing was overlooked that might contribute to the appearance of the marching units or would impress the civilian onlookers with the spirit and proficiency of Uncle Sam’s [African American] soldiers.
Under a lowering sky a caravan of mule-drawn canvas-covered wagons brought the selected units from the fort to the staging area where the marching ranks would form.
Since this event was one of the highlights of the year the board walks along the main streets were lined with interested spectators. Shifting and pushing for better vantage points they waited with outstretched necks for their first glimpse of the procession. The little puffs of dust blown up by the intermittent breeze went unnoticed in the concentration on the approaching spectacle.
Heading the parade rode the civilian Marshall of the Day [Judge Sloan], a little pompous and self-conscious in his unaccustomed role. Regaled in frontier style of cowboy hat, bright neckerchief, gauntlet gloves, and riding boots he seemed something of a stranger to his town folk. Urging his staid white horse into as much pirouetting and prancing as a few jabs of spurs and his generous bulk allowed, he drew guffaws and giggles as he passed.
Next came the military section preceded and flanked by its officers. The ripple of applause that rang like a light breeze along the massed walks swelled into a roar as the color guard came into view. A grizzled sergeant who might, with a little stretch of imagination, have been born in a slave cabin, carried with visible pride and grave dignity the bright banner of freedom, for black as well as white.
The military band that followed set a quick tempo for marching feet. With the matchless musical heritage of the [African American] race it somehow wove into the stirring strains of martial music a faintly plaintive melody while adding a hint of rollicking rhythm that set spectators’ feet to tapping. A steady beat of clapping hands kept pace with the ordered ranks as they swept by. Here were men whose ancestors came in chains. Scarcely more than a generation separated them from others of their race who had endured the bondage of slavery. Here too were the men who as the next page of history turned, wrote their own brilliant record of heroism. On the fields of El Caney and the slopes of San Juan they proved again, as others of their race have from Brandywine to the Yalu, that the red blood of courage runs as rich and red in black veins as white.
Wearing with confidence and pride the uniform of the guardians of American freedom, the disciplined ranks swung past the cheering spectators. Eyes forward, dark faces closed and intent, their effortless rhythmic steps carried them quickly past the improvised reviewing stand where the highest “brass” stood at stiff attention, backed by an awkward line of civic dignitaries plainly ill at ease in their unusual prominent position.
The crisp command to halt snapped the march with a lightning change of mood, with their part of the parade over. These soldiers had no plan to spend any free time listening to the grandiloquent oratory or amateurish entertainment that would follow. They anticipated livelier activities. Undeterred by the threatening clouds which the wind was driving closer, kicking up more frequent spirals of whirling dust, they set about the real fun of the day.
Another kind of pageantry got under way. Every available vehicle that livery barns and private sources could furnish was soon wheeling the streets.
Every source that could furnish female riding partners had been thoroughly combed; including [African-American] maids from officers’ families, laundresses from the post supplemented with their counterparts from the more plutocratic local citizens, wives and other feminine members of the families of the non-coms, perhaps some sultry demoiselles from the demimonde world that flourishes near army reservations, all were sought out and swept into an informal parade around the little city’s few main streets.
High wheeled open buggies with tightly check-reined horses alternated with buckboards and carts, and any other available equipage.
Back and forth, up and down, and around the residential areas the little procession wound.
Yellow-gloved hands manipulated reins with a studied nonchalance. Ramrod stiff drivers saluted other ramrod stiff drivers with more or less dignified dipping of the whips. Ladies bowed graciously in return to other gracious and formal bows.
The uniformed men offered a striking foil to the elegance of their ladies. The era one might say was one of high fashion. The costumes of the ladies displayed all the lacy, ribboned, ornamented frills and furbelows of the period’s elaborate style.
The carnival spirit that lurks in every [African American] breast expressed itself in snatches of song, gay banter, and bursts of laughter with cat calls and cheers from the side lines where the less fortunate who weren’t able to get into the parade lined up to watch and good-humoredly heckle the passing show.
The gay mood diminished but little even as the weather worsened. Summer storms that blew up suddenly were frequent in the locality and often of short duration. The pleasures of the day had been too long anticipated and planned to give them easily up even in the face of the threatening storm. The mood was to ride it out.
The wind, a frequent prelude to a change in a storm’s pace or direction, dropped suddenly. Just as suddenly a few big soft snowflakes came drifting down. Their gentle fall increased momentarily into a sustained curtain that clung spectacularly to the thick summer foliage of the trees and sprinkled a sparkling layer on neighboring patches of grass. The big flakes melted and ran in little rivulets from the steaming flanks of the horses, [clinging] tenaciously to lacy parasols and ribboned bonnets, and powdered filmy blouses and dresses.
The mercurial [African American] temperament exploded at first into shouts and shrieks of laughter as the fluffy flakes kept falling at what seemed a frenzied rate. But the discomfort of their melting and soaking through fragile finery proved too much for further fun. The women raced to the shelter of the covered wagons while their damp escorts hurried the rigs back to their shelters.
A stray sunbeam or two peeked out from the scudding clouds as the storm passed. But participants and spectators alike had melted away. Sodden slushy streets, limp fading bunting, and deserted stands marked the thoroughness with which the freak storm had so disconcertingly wiped out the day’s festivities.
Agnes D. Lauber
Seattle, Washington – 1959

APOLOGIA
When a small girl, the writer of this little episode was making, with her family, a covered wagon trek from central to western Montana.
With the occupants of the other wagons of our little party we arrived in Missoula in time to witness this celebration from the shelter of our own covered wagon.
We children, at least, who had never seen such a parade and probably not more than a half dozen [African American] people together at one time were fascinated.
Perhaps for that reason the celebration made a deep impression on my mind.
My own recollection of the day may be unconsciously supplemented and colored by the comments and accounts of others of our party. But whatever their contributions may have been I have kept through the lapse of many years a clear memory of the main events of the day.
Perhaps the accounts I read a little later of the brilliant record of heroism made by these [African American] troops during the Spanish American War helped to fix this occasion in my mind.

The above story has been slightly edited by me, a great-nephew of Agnes D. Lauber.
Agnes was born in Bozeman, Montana in 1885. She was a younger sister of my grandmother, Marguerite Gilder Dickerman. Both sisters graduated from Missoula High School in 1904 and attended U of M in Missoula; Agnes graduating in 1908. Agnes taught grade school at Hawthorne and Old Roosevelt schools in Missoula. She was also teaching at Sunset School in Greenough when it burned down in 1933.
She married Frank Lauber of Iowa in 1924. He died in Seattle in 1932. They had one son, John Francis Lauber in Iowa, in 1925. Dr. John Lauber, a UW graduate, was, among other books, the author of a biography of Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain). Agnes died in Seattle, Washington in 1979.