Lost People of America: The Redbone Genetic Mystery

Added: 2026-05-20

[00:00:00]In a letter dated May 1893, the treasurer of Kkasu Parish, Louisiana, sat down to answer a question from a South Carolina ethnologist named Macdonald Furman. The ethnologist had written asking about a group of people in the Louisiana pine country whom local whites called Red Bones. The treasurer's name was Albert Riggmaiden. He had lived among them his entire adult life. His reply has survived in the manuscript collections of Duke University.

[00:00:28]I am unable to tell you how the name Red Bone originated. Rig Maiden wrote, "I suppose you know the kind of people called Red Bones. They are neither white nor black, and as well as I can find out, the oldest ones came from South Carolina many years ago." He listed the principal surnames as he knew them.

[00:00:44]Ashworth, Goens, Perkins, Drake, Sweat, Buckton, Doyle, or Dial, Johnson, Esavant.

[00:00:52]They keep, he wrote, pretty well together and marry amongst themselves mostly.

[00:00:58]That letter is one of the earliest written attempts by an outsider to describe the Red Bones. It identifies accurately three things that more than a century of subsequent research has confirmed. The community was triracial.

[00:01:10]Its founding families had migrated west from the South Carolina back country.

[00:01:15]And whoever they were, the state of Louisiana could not file them under any existing category. To trace those founding families backward, the documentary record runs to colonial Virginia and North Carolina. To trace them forward, it runs through a piece of ground that in the spring of 1804 did not belong to any country at all. From 1806 to 1821, by mutual agreement of local Spanish and American officers, a strip of land between the Sabine River and the Aoyo Hondo was left outside the jurisdiction of either nation. The Adams honest treaty would eventually settle the dispute. In the meantime, the strip had no government, no courts, no taxes, and no enforceable laws. The Spanish called it the tiara dinadi. The American newspapers called it the sabine free state. The settlers who moved into it called it the neutral ground or no man's land. It was Pine Ridge and Blackwater Creek, longleaf forest dense enough to hide a man within a few yards of the trail. Into it between roughly 1800 and 1820 moved a wave of free families of color from the Carolinas, Georgia and the older settlements of southern Mississippi. Their surnames are recorded in the federal censuses of 1810, 1820 and 1830 for the parishes that would later become Rapids, St. Landry, Kalcasier, Vernon, and Borugar. Among them were the families Rigg Maiden would name 80 years later. The first of those families to leave a substantial paper trail was the family of Joseph Willis.

[00:02:45]Joseph Willis was born in Bladen County, North Carolina, sometime between 1760 and 1765. His father, Aggerton Willis, was a wealthy English descended planter.

[00:02:56]His mother, whose name family tradition records as Sarah, was a Cherokee enslaved by the family. Under the North Carolina Partis law of 1741, a child's legal status followed the mothers.

[00:03:08]Joseph entered the world as his father's property. Aggerton Willis died in 1777 before completing the manum mission he had intended. The will was contested.

[00:03:19]In a letter dated October 1777 to Governor Richard Caswell, Joseph's uncle Daniel Willis wrote that my brother Aggerton Willis gave the greatest part of his estate to his Malata boy Joseph.

[00:03:32]And as he is a born slave and not set free agreeable to law, my brother's heirs are not satisfied that he shall have it.

[00:03:39]For 10 years, Joseph lived as if free, but legally was not. In November 1787, Joseph's first cousin, John Willis, by then a member of the General Assembly of North Carolina, introduced a private bill to emancipate him. The bill passed its third reading on December 6th, 1787.

[00:03:56]Joseph received 320 acres in settlement, less than his father had intended. He had served in the revolution under Francis Marion in the South Carolina swamps. He converted under the preaching of the Whitefield revival. By 1798, he was preaching as an unordained Baptist exhorter in southwest Mississippi.

[00:04:16]In 1810, the Mississippi Baptist Association declined to ordain him because he was of mixed race. He returned in 1812.

[00:04:24]Moses Hadley of the same association crossed the river that year and ordained him in Louisiana. That same year on Bay Chico near present day Vil Plat, Joseph Willis founded Calvary Baptist Church.

[00:04:36]It was the first Baptist church established west of the Mississippi River. Within months, his fellow veteran of Marian's command, Ezekiel O'Quinn, founded Half Moon Bluff Baptist on the Bogue Cheto. Both men were of mixed race. Both led congregations that would over the next 40 years plant Baptist churches across central and western Louisiana. Joseph Willis died on September 14th, 1854.

[00:05:00]He is buried at Occupy Baptist Cemetery in Pitkin in what is now Vernon Parish.

[00:05:06]The stone identifies him as the first Baptist preacher of the word west of the Mississippi River. On January 18th, 1955, mourers gathered at the grave in freezing weather to unveil a monument in his memory. Willis's life is unusually well lit by the historical record. Most mixed race people who shaped the Red Bone Frontier left far fainter traces known to us through land grants, census marks, and the occasional court record.

[00:05:30]The Ashworth family of southeast Texas is one such case.

[00:05:34]The Ashworth family migration into Texas began with William Ashworth, born in South Carolina in the 1790s.

[00:05:42]He crossed the Sabine in 1831 and received a land grant in Lorenzo de Zavala's colony in what is now southeast Texas. When William signed his land application in Nakogdes, he marked the document with an X above the Spanish form of his name, Guilermo Ashworth. He had not been taught to write. By 1850, the Ashworths had built one of the largest cattle operations on the upper Gulf Coast. The agricultural schedule of the federal census that year recorded Aaron Ashworth with 2570 head of cattle on roughly 14,000 acres in Jefferson County, Texas. Aaron's household also included six enslaved black workers, a fact preserved in the slave schedule of the same census. He kept a white tutor in residence to educate his four schoolage children who were not permitted to attend the white schools.

[00:06:29]On February 5th, 1840, the Congress of the Republic of Texas had passed an act prohibiting the immigration of free blacks into the Republic and ordering all free black residents to leave within 2 years or be sold into slavery. The text of the act made the intent explicit. Color was to be made the standard mark of servitude, and the existing free black population was to be eliminated. The Ashworths and their neighbors responded with three petitions to Congress. the first signed by 60 white citizens of Jefferson County. The petitions were introduced by Jefferson County Representative Joseph Griggsby on November 5th, 1840.

[00:07:07]President Mirabbo Lamar signed the resulting bill on December 12th, 1840.

[00:07:14]Its final language extended protection to all free persons of color together with their families who were residing in Texas on the day of the Declaration of Independence.

[00:07:23]The newspapers nicknamed it the Ashworth Act. It is the only legislative act in the history of the Republic of Texas that exempted free people of color from a general expulsion order. Its passage was secured by the petition of one tri-racial extended family and the white neighbors who knew them. 16 years later, the same neighborhood produced the Orange County War. The triggering event is recorded in the court records of Orange County and in the writings of historian WT Block. On May 15th, 1856, Deputy Sheriff Samuel Deputy arrested Clark Ashworth on a charge of stealing a hog. Clark posted bond, which was secured by his cousin Sam Ashworth.

[00:08:01]Later that day, Sam confronted the deputy in town and challenged him to a jewel. The deputy refused and instead arrested Sam for abusive language from a black. Justice Reading examined Sam, ruled that he was a mulatto, and sentenced him to 30 lashes on the bare back.

[00:08:18]Sheriff Edward C. Glover, who knew the family, allowed Sam to escape before the sentence could be carried out. Within days, Sam Ashworth and his cousin Jack Bunch ambushed Samuel Deputy as he crossed the Sabine River by boat with a friend named AC Marman.

[00:08:32]During the attack, the deputy was hit.

[00:08:34]However, his friend Marman jumped overboard and survived to testify.

[00:08:38]What followed lasted approximately 2 months. vigilantes calling themselves the moderators forced Sheriff Glover from office and pursued the Ashworth family and its supporters who organized as regulators.

[00:08:50]The largest sawmill in the town that is now Orange, Texas was burned when the mob suspected Sam might be hiding inside it. A moderator posy tracked Sheriff Glover to his uncle's farm. A confrontation followed, but Glover perished. Frederick Law Olmstead traveling through Texas that same year for the New York Daily Times, recorded the persistence of regulator moderator violence in his subsequent book, A Journey through Texas. By the time the fighting ended, at least 12 men had perished. 18-year-old Jack Bunch was captured near Columbus and returned to Bowmont, where his story came to a brutal end. Sam Ashworth escaped west, joined the Confederate army, and reportedly perished at the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862.

[00:09:32]On the Louisiana side of the Sabine, the same decade produced a different outcome. In 1837 and again in 1849, several members of the Redbone community in southwestern Louisiana were indicted for illegal voting. The charge in each case was that the men had voted as whites when they were in fact persons of color. The state court found the defendants not guilty in both proceedings. The verdicts established that the state of Louisiana would treat the red bone community as legally white.

[00:10:00]The records of those cases survive in the parish archives of Kolkasur and Rapids. They record neither denial of mixed ancestry nor an affirmative finding of pure European descent. They record only the inability of the prosecution to prove that the defendants were black under Louisiana law and the corresponding judgment of a quiddle.

[00:10:20]That legal status once established applied to school enrollment, marriage licenses, voting roles, and military service. It separated the Louisiana red bones from the Melundians of Tennessee and the Lumbies of North Carolina, both of whom were legally classified as non-white during the same period and face the educational and political consequences of that classification.

[00:10:41]The violence between Redbone families and incoming non- Redbone settlers continued in waves through the late 19th century. The Westport fight occurred on Christmas Eve 1881 in southern Rapids Parish. The only firsthand chronicle was written by Webster Telma Crawford, a local historian who collected the surviving accounts in the early 20th century.

[00:11:03]Friction between Red Bone families and recent arrivals had been building for weeks. The fight involved several families and ended with the burning of a store owned by some of the newer settlers. The Barehead Creek incident occurred on August 2nd, 1891 in what is now southern Borugard Parish. Six men perished and several others wounded. The story was carried by the New Orleans Times Pikaune, the Dallas Morning News, and the New York Times. In the early 20th century, the longleaf pine forests of western Louisiana and East Texas were cut for industrial lumber. The forest in which red bone families had lived for nearly a century became the site of one of the largest non-UN busting campaigns in southern labor history. The Brotherhood of Timber Workers, founded in 1910, organized lumber workers across the region in defiance of company policy. Historian Kendall Gordon Arts documents how lumber operators use the term red bone as an instrument of racial reclassification.

[00:12:00]Company rosters of the period recorded only three categories of worker, white, black, and Mexican. Lumber Baron John Kirby in surviving correspondents applied the term red bone to white union members whose union activity in his account made their whiteness questionable. In 1913, Brotherhood of Timber Workers organizer Arthur Lee Emerson was assaulted by company gunmen who called him a red bone. A trade magazine of the same year reported that two former union members had withdrawn because they couldn't stand for the red bones that were running it. Arts term for this is precarious whiteness. The word red bone, he argues, did not consistently denote ancestry. It denoted a person whose racial classification could be revoked on the basis of behavior the dominant community judged to be improper for a white person. The genetic and genealological evidence on the red bones falls into three categories. The documentary paper trail, the comparative DNA studies of related communities, and the smaller scale family DNA results published by red bone descendants themselves. The documentary paper trail has been substantially mapped by the genealogologist Paul Heinek. Heck has traced several of the core red bone surnames directly to colonial Virginia and North Carolina free families. The Gowen family ancestor of the Goen's lines descends from a man recorded in 1641 Virginia court records as John Gayaween who was free by that date. By 1810, the Gowen family had spread to 40 households across Virginia, the Carolas, and Louisiana. The Bass and Sweat families appear in the registers of Surrey County, Virginia in the late 17th century. The Bunch and Chavis surnames, also among the Red Bone founding families, are similarly documented. The DNA evidence specific to the Red Bones is limited. The closest published work is the Melundian Core DNA project, founded in 2005.

[00:13:54]The melundians of Appalachia share several coarser names with the red bones including Goens, Perkins and Bunch and Hine has shown they share colonial Virginia origins. The Melundian study tested more than 80 Y chromosome lines and a comparable number of mitochondrial lines from documented Melundian descendants. Of the male lines, 47.5% carried Hapla group R1B, the most common paternal marker of Western Europe. 30% carried R1, A, I, and J.

[00:14:24]Only one tested male carried HLO group Q, the principal Native American paternal marker. Every mitochondrial line tested was European, predominantly Hapla group H. Smaller scale testing within red bone families has produced more varied results. A male line test from one Ashworth descendant reported by researcher Gary Gabahart in 2008 returned less than 1% African ancestry modest Native American ancestry and significant Mediterranean and South Asian ad mixture including Armenian Romanian and Asian Indian components.

[00:14:56]The variation is consistent with what would be expected of a community formed by intermarriage among Western European, Native American, African, and possibly Mediterranean, and South Asian ancestors over the course of two and a half centuries. The Red Bone Heritage Foundation, founded in 2004, holds an annual research conference in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Its proceedings have published genealological and historical papers by Don Marlor, Stacy Webb, Jason Gilmer, and others. The work of Webster Telma Crawford in the early 20th century of Vernon Parish historian Aubrey Gates and of more recent researchers including Randy Willis who is a direct descendant of Joseph Willis has reconstructed substantial portions of the documentary record that the community itself was for most of two centuries not in a position to publish. The Louisiana censuses of 1810 through 2020 record the same surnames in the same parishes across 210 years. The cemeteries at Bayuchiko, Occupy Baptist in Pitkin, 10M, and the smaller family plots throughout Vernon, Borugard, Allen, and Kalcasia parishes contain the graves of the families those censuses recorded. The land Gilbert Sweat and his wife donated for Calvary Baptist Church on Bay Chico in 1812 is still the site of the church. The term red bone, applied to the community first by outsiders and used through the 19th and 20th centuries primarily as a slur began appearing in self-description by descendants in the 1990s.

[00:16:24]The Red Bone Heritage Foundation uses it as the community's preferred name. The most recent peer-reviewed work on the population, including the arts article in American Quarterly and the ongoing genealological reconstruction by Hineg and his successors, has confirmed what Albert Rigmaiden, the Kalasu parish treasurer, wrote in his letter of May 1893.

[00:16:45]The Red Bones are neither white nor black. The oldest of their founding families came from South Carolina and before that from colonial Virginia and North Carolina. They keep mostly to themselves. Approximately 10,000 people by the most commonly cited estimates currently identify as descendants of the historic redbone community in southwestern Louisiana and southeast Texas.

[00:17:07]The number who carry the relevant ancestry without identifying with the community is unknown and likely substantially larger. The records continue to be opened. The samples continue to be sequenced. The questions the community could not safely ask in 1810 or 1856 or 1913 are now being asked and increasingly answered. Please like and subscribe for more such videos. I will see you in the next one. Thanks for watching.