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Henry
O. Flipper
An Epic Remaining To Be Told
by C.
F. Eckhardt | 
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Perhaps
the most enigmatic figure in the annals of the American West is not Johnny Ringo
of maybe-suicide/maybe-murder or the deliberately enigmatic Mysterious Dave Mather,
but 2/LT Henry O. Flipper, 10th United States Cavalry.
LT Flipper's early
life is fairly well documented. Born of slaves in Georgia, he was emancipated
in 1865 while still a child. He seems to have been gifted with a superior intellect.
He was appointed from Georgia to the United States Military Academy at West Point,
New York.
Flipper was by no means the first Black ever appointed to West
Point, but he was the first to complete the four-year course and graduate as a
commissioned officer in the United States Army. The fact that he completed the
course is a tribute to Flipper's tenacity, for his years at West Point were not
happy ones. The Corps of Cadets had-and has-a treatment for those who offend against
the cadets' own unwritten code of conduct. It consists of-silence. No one
will speak to a cadet under 'silence,' nor even acknowledge his existence. No
one will communicate with him in any way other than official orders, which will
be given orally. He will be ignored-as though he doesn't exist at all.
Flipper was given 'silence' from the instant he entered the academy. Cadets given
'silence' usually resign. Some have committed suicide. Flipper endured four years
of 'silence' and graduated.
Once
he was commissioned he found himself between the proverbial rock and hard place.
As the only Black officer in the 10th Cavalry, he had no social life. Except for
official functions, he was frozen out of the life and society of the other officers
of the 10th, all of whom were white. As an officer, he was expressly forbidden,
under the Army's 'no fraternization' policy, from socializing with the enlisted
men.
Fort Davis,
Texas, is 5,000 feet up in the Davis Mountains, nearly 300 miles southeast of
El Paso and over 300
miles northwest of San Antonio.
In the 1880s there were virtually no Black people at all around Fort Davis save
for the enlisted men of the 10th and the prostitutes who gathered to accommodate
them.
In addition, he had no future at all in the Army and he had to know
it. It was possible to make Captain-barely possible-on merit alone, but that was
extremely difficult. Most promotions were a result of patronage, political pull,
or advantageous relationships. A young 2/LT who attracted the favorable eye of
his regimental commander or a General officer-as 2/LT George A. Custer attracted
the favorable eye of Major General Philip Sheridan-could rise high with meteoric
speed. Custer went from 2/LT to Brevet Major General in less than two years during
the War Between the States. He was reduced to a permanent rank of Captain in the
3rd Cavalry at the end of the war. He transferred to the newly-organized 7th in
1866. Ten years later he had risen to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and to effective
command of his regiment. This was due to two factors-Phil Sheridan's patronage
and a politically-advantageous marriage. In spite of the fact that he actually
was a competent commander of cavalry, had he not had Sheridan's patronage and
made that politically-advantageous marriage he most likely would never have been
brevetted past Colonel during the War, and certainly would have stagnated at Captain
until retirement. Flipper had no patron and no politically-advantageous connections.
The best he could hope for after completing the required 30 years for retirement
was a single silver bar in his shoulder straps and a pension of $37.50 per month.
Flipper's sole asset was his brain, and that-because he was Black-counted
for little in the 19th Century U. S. Army. While at Fort Davis Flipper was apprehended,
detained, and tried by Court Martial for the crime of misappropriation of the
Company Fund.
The Company Fund, in the frontier Army, was what made life
bearable. The Army furnished a barracks, a wooden cot with a cotton sack to be
filled with grass for a mattress, and two blankets for bedding. For food it furnished
salt beef or pork, hardtack biscuits, blackstrap molasses, dessicated potatoes
(they looked-but didn't taste-like brown sugar), and a 'vegetable block'-a ghastly
compressed block of dried vegetables-for two meals a day, not three. Very little
else came from the supply room. Everything that made life endurable on a frontier
post-seeds to plant a post garden, sports equipment, magazines and books, games
like checkers (which the Army still called 'draughts' as late as the 1890s) and
dominoes for off-duty time-were purchased using the Company Fund. A Cavalry 2/LT
made $55 a month, base pay, while a private's base pay was, by 1881, $13 per month.
Enlisted men were require to contribute $2 to the Company Fund each quarterly
payday, officers $5. This was a substantial portion of a soldier's pay.
Several
reams have been written-and no doubt more will be written-purporting to 'prove'
Flipper did or did not commit the offense with which he was charged. From all
available historical evidence he was, in fact, guilty as charged. There was, however,
a definite peculiarity about the case.
2/LT Henry O. Flipper was tried
by Court Martial for the offense of theft-misappropriation of a Company Fund.
Under the Articles of War he could be dishonorably discharged, stripped not merely
of his commission but of his Army-earned civil engineer's credentials, and sentenced
to as much as ten years at hard labor in a federal penitentiary. He was dishonorably
discharged and stripped of his commission-but nothing else. Numerous white officers,
charged with the same or a similar offense, were dishonorably discharged, stripped
of their commissions and civil engineer's credentials, and sent to prison. Why
not Flipper?
When Flipper walked out of Fort
Davis amidst the turned backs of the troops, with 'Rogue's March' being played
by the company band, his next stop was El
Paso. There, waiting for him, was a fully-equipped civil engineer's office.
Sitting on the desk were several contracts for civil engineering work-most particularly
surveying-across western Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Many of those contracts
came directly from the War Department and involved work to be done directly for
the U. S. Army. From those contracts-which could not have been let without the
approval of some of the same officers who approved the findings of his Court Martial-Flipper
emerged with a comfortable nest egg and a reputation as a competent civil engineer.
Obviously, somebody was taking very good car of ex-Lieutenant Henry O.
Flipper. Who? And why?
Those questions remain unanswered to this day. There
are indications, though, that Flipper, realizing his horizons in the Army were
extremely limited, voluntarily took the fall for a cabal of junior-and perhaps
not so junior-officers in the 10th. The fall was greatly sweetened by the prospect
of a very light sentence-no penal servitude, no fine, no restitution, no loss
of engineering credentials-and a ready-made cash cushion in the form of some extremely
lucrative government contracts waiting on him in El
Paso. |
In
the controversy that surrounds Flipper's Army career, the facts of his post-Army
civil engineering career have been largely ignored. That's unfortunate, because
by far the most intriguing and interesting part of his life came after
he left Fort Davis.
Details
of Flipper's life after the Army are sketchy, and he was rumored dead long before
his actual death at the home of his Baptist-preacher brother in Atlanta, Georgia,
in 1940. J. Frank Dobie, writing in the mid-1930s in his classic APACHE GOLD AND
YAQUI SILVER, remarked that Flipper, "if he is still alive," could no likely shed
much light on the probable locations of legendary lost gold mines and treasure
troves like Tayopa and El Naranjal. Likely he could have. |
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Flipper seems to
have been a born linguist-one of those fortunate people who can 'pick up' a language
easily. He spoke English, Spanish, French, and German fluently by the time he
was assigned to Fort
Davis. He picked up very quickly on several native languages in the area,
including the almost-impossible Athabaskan language of the Apaches. By the time
he was drummed out of the Army, he was fluent in the Apache tongue.
Flipper
worked out of El Paso
for a few years after being discharged, then moved into northern Mexico to do
survey work for the Mexican government. Many of the surveys still used in northern
Chihuahua and Sonora were done by Henry O. Flipper and his oddly-assorted crews
of Indians, Mexicans, and US expatriates. (Not a few of the 'expatriates' seem
to have been 'expatriated' by flyers north of the border reading WANTED.)
It is known that Flipper kept his field notes in French. Neither the Mexicans-those
who could read-nor the American expatriates could make use of them, since they
didn't read French. There may have been a reason for that. Henry O. Flipper is
the only known non-Yaqui ever to view the Yaqui Easter ritual and survive.
The
Yaqui are an Athabaskan-speaking tribe that live in the far reaches of northern
and western Sonora, high in the Sierra Madre Occidental. They are also quite possibly
the most warlike and pitiless tribe of American Indians. Chiricahua Apache mothers
(Geronimo was a Chiricahua) frighten their noisy children into silence with "The
Yaqui will get you." My friend Chico Dyke, who grew up on the Warm Springs Reservation
in Arizona with his Chiricahua father's relatives, tells me his grandmother and
aunts effectively silenced him and his cousins with threats of the Yaquis.
About
the only yori-the word can mean 'enemies,' 'demons,' or 'white men'-ever
to penetrate Yaquiland without taking heavy casualties were Jesuit priests, and
they took casualties before they finally won the trust of the Yaqui. "Which goes
to show you," says Chico, who doesn't like Jesuits any more than he likes Yaquis,
"just how weird those people are."
For about a century before the Spanish
government expelled them in the 1770s, Jesuits held total religious sway among
the Yaqui. When they were forced out they left a lot of things behind. Among them
was a peculiarly Christian-influenced, primarily-pagan worship that included Christ
and the Christian saints merged with much older native rituals. They also left
behind rumors of rich mines of gold and silver hidden, and rich hoards of bullion
buried. At least two of the mines-Tayopa and El Naranjal (the orangery)
were documented as existing.
Into Yaquiland in the late 1880s and early
1890s came surveyor/civil engineer Henry O. Flipper. Flipper already spoke the
Apache dialect of Athabaskan, and since Yaqui is also an Athabaskan dialect, it
was fairly easy for him to make himself understood. He was obviously not a white
man and he had a personal story of evil suffered at the hands of the yori.
It would be impossible to prove unless Flipper recorded it in his papers and they
have survived, but rumor holds that Flipper was adopted into the Yaqui tribe.
Again, it is known that he is the only known non-Yaqui to have witnessed the Yaqui
Easter ceremony and lived to tell about it. This ceremony is a bizarre ritual
which, if still practiced today, is practiced entirely in secret. The centerpiece
is a human body-a dead man. How the corpse is provided remains a Yaqui secret.
The corpse represents Pontius Pilate. During the ceremony it is defiled-spat on,
urinated and defecated on, kicked, and pummeled. After the ceremony the corpse
disappears-and where it goes is a Yaqui secret as well.
Flipper, sometime
around 1900, both photographed and filmed the Yaqui Easter ceremony. The film
was a staple in college-level American Indian anthropology courses in the 1920s
but seems to have disappeared over the years, as have all but a few muddy prints
of Flipper's still photographs taken at the same time.
If Flipper was
allowed to view, photograph, and survive the Easter ceremony, what other secrets
might the Yaqui have trusted him with? The lost mining complex of Tayopa,
the object of enthusiastic horseback searches during the 19th and the first part
of the 20th centuries, was finally located from the air in the 1930s. El Naranjal,
both a mining complex and a hacienda, famed for tiny, bitter Seville oranges
and gold with an impurity that gave it a peculiar orange hue, remains hidden even
today, somewhere in the vastness of Yaquiland. Occasionally, on the lower end
of the Yaqui River in Sonora, one may find rotten Seville oranges that have obviously
floated from a long way off.
We
know Flipper went often to Mexico City. Although his family, at his death, insisted
he lived and died a bachelor, there is-or there was, a couple of generations back--a
Flipper family in Mexico City who exhibited distinctive African-mixed facial features
and claimed to trace its ancestry to an Enrique Flipper. If the union that produced
these offspring was a legal one, Henry O. Flipper, at one time in his life, professed
Roman Catholicism. Since the family in Georgia was staunchly Baptist, it is very
likely they would have denied he ever married.
We also have reason to suspect
that, sometime around World War I or a little later, Flipper was in South America,
particularly in Brazil. Rumor holds that he was hunting for João Aranzel's Lago
del Oro-the fabled lake with shores of gold dust deep in Brazil's Sertão,
the legendary source of Aranzel's fabulous wealth. Although every indication of
Flipper's perspicacity says he was far too canny to be taken in by the Lago
del Oro yarn, Aranzel did have a source of raw gold somewhere in the Sertão
that has never been found. Flipper's talent for acquiring fluency in Amerindian
dialects in a few weeks, plus his long experience in friendly dealing with Indians
in the American southwest and northern Mexico, would certainly have given him
an advantage over most searchers for such a treasure.
We know that Flipper
returned to the US sometime in the 1930s. We know he died in Atlanta, at the home
of his Baptist-preacher brother. We know he was the first Black man to graduate
from West Point, and we know he was dishonorably discharged from the Army.
What we don't know about Henry O. Flipper-where he went and what he did
between the time he was drummed out of the Army and the time he turned up, and
old man, at his brother's home in Atlanta, would make a fascinating book. The
nucleus for that book may exist. We know he kept copious field notes in French.
What went into those notes-and more important, where are they today? |
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