Page:W. E. B. Du Bois - The Gift of Black Folk.pdf/62

50 William Alexander Leidsdrofi was the most distinguished Negro pioneer of California and at one time lived in the largest house in San Francisco. He owned the first steamship sailing in San Francisco Bay, and was a prominent business man, a member of the City Council and treasurer and member of the school committee. H. H. Bancroft says: “William Alexander Leidsdroff, a native of Danish West Indies, son of a Dane by a mulattress, who came to the United States as a boy and became a master of vessels sailing between New York and New Orleans, came to California as manager of the ‘Julia Ann,’ on which he made later trips to the Islands, down to 1845.” His correspondence from 1845, when he became United States Vice-Consul is a valuable source of historical information. Many Negroes came in the rush of the “forty-niners” as pioneers and miners as well as slaves.

The Negro’s work as a pioneer extends down until our day. The late Commodore Peary who discovered the North Pole said: “Matthew A. Henson, my Negro assistant, has been with me in one capacity or another since my second trip to Nicaragua in 1887. I have taken him on each and all of my expeditions, except the first, and also without exception on each of my farthest sledge trips. This position I have given him primarily