Bozeman Magazine

A Black Woman’s West: A Tribute to Rose B. Gordon Born in the Barker mining district of central Montana Territory, Rose Beatrice Gordon (1883-1968) was the daughter of an African American chef and an emancipated slave who migrated to the West in the early 1880s, eventually settling in White Sulphur Springs, where Rose lived most of her life. She operated a restaurant in White Sulphur Springs for decades, as well as earning a living later in life as a massage therapist and caregiver. My talk will document Rose Gordon’s life and tell the story of the Gordon family as part of a larger history of the African American West, but my primary focus will be Rose’s writing. Through letters to the editor and eventually through a regular newspaper column for the Meagher County News, Rose Gordon established a distinctive public voice as an African American woman, as a Montanan, and as a writer of local and western history. His talk pays tribute to Rose Gordon’s accomplishments as a writer. Michael K. Johnson is Professor of American literature at the University of Maine at Farmington. His primary research areas are African American Literature and the literature and culture of the American West. He is a former co-president of the Western Literature Association. He is the author of Black Masculinity and the Frontier Myth in American Literature (University of Oklahoma) and Hoo-Doo Cowboys and Bronze Buckaroos: Conceptions of the African American West (University Press of Mississippi). His biography of Montana-born African American singer Taylor Gordon, Can’t Stand Still: Taylor Gordon and the Harlem Renaissance (University Press of Mississippi) was published in 2019. His biography of Taylor’s sister Rose, A Black Woman’s West: The Life of Rose B. Gordon, was published in 2022 by the Montana Historical Society Press.