The Wild West of Yester-Year
Lulu Mae Sadler Craig
By Rachel Kovaciny
Has an Oscar-winning
movie director ever filmed your birthday party and turned it
into a documentary? When Lulu Mae Sadler Craig turned 102,
Harry Belafonte Enterprises sent Richard Kaplan to film her
party and interview her and her family. The resulting
documentary, Happy Birthday Mrs. Craig, has been a staple of
classes on American women’s history, African-American
history, and Western Expansion history ever since.
Lulu Mae, often
called Lula, was born in 1868, only three years after the
Civil War ended. Her parents were former slaves living in
Missouri; her father fought for his freedom with General
Sherman’s forces. When Lulu Mae was four years old, her
family moved west in search of better land and freer living
conditions. They were among the earliest groups of former
slaves to move to Kansas.
In 1878, when Lulu
Mae was ten, the Sadler family moved to the new all-black
town of Nicodemus, KS, which formed as part of the
widespread “Exoduster Migration” that involved thousands of
black pioneers. At first, you couldn’t really tell Nicodemus
existed because the settlers all built dugouts to live in,
rather than building houses above the ground. All you could
see were the stovepipes sticking up out of the prairie.
Dugouts were easier to build on the open prairie, where
trees for lumber were rare. They provided excellent shelter
from the snow and bitter cold, but they were by nature hard
to keep clean. Don’t imagine a hobbit hole, imagine a root
cellar with a few boards and poles here and there to
stabilize the roof, and a single cast-iron stove to heat the
dugout and cook on.
Thanks to their
determination and ingenuity, plus contributions of food from
local American Indians, the residents of Nicodemus survived
the winter and started farms in the spring. Many of these
pioneers had no plows, so they broke the land with hoes and
shovels when necessary. This was a hardscrabble life indeed,
but they persevered. By 1880, there were over four hundred
people living in and around Nicodemus. They built houses
above the ground, along with stores and churches. Much of
what we know about the history of this community comes from
Lulu Mae’s memoir, A History of Nicodemus, Graham County,
Kansas.
At fifteen, Lulu Mae
began attending one of the first schools in Kansas. The
famous scientist George Washington Carver was among her
classmates and became her lifelong friend. Lulu Mae
graduated from the State Teachers College in Emporia, KS,
and returned to Nicodemus to teach grades one through eight
there. Like most frontier schoolteachers, she had few books,
slates, or other supplies, but she educated class after
class of children there.
Lulu Mae Sadler
married Sanford Craig in 1886, and they farmed near
Nicodemus for nearly thirty years. They had nine children,
seven of whom lived to adulthood. Their longest-surviving
child Merido passed away not so long ago, in 2007. Besides
raising their children and helping on the farm, Lulu Mae was
active in community life. She even served on the Nicodemus
Election Board in 1914, which was a rare accomplishment for
any American woman at that time.
Unfortunately, the
railroads never built a line that came close to Nicodemus,
and the town slowly faded away. In 1915, Lulu Mae and
Sanford Craig left. They moved to Colorado and filed a
homestead claim in an area called “The Dry” near Manzanola.
Once again, there was little lumber available for building a
house, so they initially lived in a dugout.
Sanford Craig died
in 1941, but Lulu Mae continued to live on and work her farm
with help from her children. In 1970, their children,
grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and
great-great-grandchildren gathered at Lulu Mae’s Colorado
home to celebrate her 102nd birthday. Richard Kaplan and his
film team captured the event on film, and took that
opportunity to preserve the reminiscences of Lulu Mae and
her family and friends. She passed away two years later, at
104. Her book and the documentary about her life continue to
be important windows into the history of the American West
for all of us. ♦