By KAREN MADORIN
Everyone dreams, wishes, hopes, or long for something. Some are blessed to build happy families, find satisfying jobs, and establish cozy homes. A dear friend recently achieved the specific dream of sharing her family story—a history specific to a small town in western Kansas. Since I’ve known Angela Bates, she’s researched and documented lives of her Kentucky ancestors, once enslaved people belonging to Vice-President Richard M. Johnson. Her story is the result of what happens when dream meets hard work and persistence.
Several years following Emancipation and the Homestead Act, recruiters traveled east to entice families to move West to homestead. Angela’s ancestors answered this call, founding Nicodemus and the surrounding township in Graham County.
Like many rural communities, Nicodemus experienced boom and bust, forcing many residents to seek jobs in urban regions. Swimming against that current, Angela changed career paths and left the city, returning to her ancestral home to document and share her family’s unique American history. Plan in mind, she collaborated with Kansas Senators Dole and Roberts, the National Park Service, and the Nicodemus community and descendants to establish Nicodemus as a National Historic Site in 1996.
For some this designation would suffice, but not Angela. For decades stories and scripts recounting an American tale specific to Angela’s family origins that led to the only remaining all Black town west of the Mississippi River waited to be shared. As she compiled family histories, ancestors’ lives scrolled through her mind like a movie on a screen.
Once technology made it possible to transition text to visuals, Angela persuaded donors, descendants of original settlers, Nicodemus Historical Society, friends, landowners, and regional filmmaker Nick Abt to turn the script simmering in her brain for decades into the documentary Ellis Trail to Nicodemus.
It first premiered February 17 at Frontier Stage in Hill City. Cast, crew, and land owners of film locations reunited to celebrate the long-awaited documentary. Hugs and laughter established the sense of a long-awaited family reunion as friends and loved ones reconnected. Two showings accommodated appreciative audiences.
Building the excitement, Angela announced an extended version of the documentary comes out later this year. A poignant script, sweeping photography, gritty visuals of actual descendants slogging over open prairie in a land unlike anything their pioneer ancestors had ever seen evoked audience gasps, sighs, laughs, and tears. Nick’s drone photography invited viewers to travel alongside those following forebearers’ footsteps through sere grasses, over eroded limestone hills, and across rivers.
Descendent interviews at the end of the documentary enriched it, adding depth to the stories of these African American pioneer settlers who sought and experienced freedom as first- time landowners and homesteaders in the West. To watch the actress playing Zerina Johnson channel her character’s emotion when she first sighted Nicodemus moved some viewers to the edge of their seats. Hearing descendants explain what Nicodemus means—a home they can always return to--and their sense of belonging to those pioneer families forced a communal scramble for tissues. Spectators responded to the power of family stories involving strong people who prayed and sacrificed their way to better lives for themselves and future generations.
While some families have dreamers who see possibility and make it happen, others don’t. The doers research and record the stories. They encourage others to share in translating that story to film to make it every human’s story-- the appeal of this documentary. While it’s unique in its representation of formerly enslaved men and women seeking freedom and landownership, its love story and willingness to risk everything for a better life is a universal dream come true.
