Journey of a Thousand Sorrows Into the Far West, Minnesota

Journey of a Thousand Sorrows Into the Far West, Minnesota: The Jeffrey Family Migration is historian and genealogist Eric A. Smith’s meticulously researched sequel to his acclaimed A Journey of a Thousand Sorrows and the Notion of Indianness. Where the first book traced Smith’s Indigenous ancestry among the seashore tribes of New England back to the Montaukett sachem Wyandanch, this volume follows the Jeffrey family of mixed African American and Native American heritage, westward from Connecticut and New York into the Upper Midwest, settling in Winona, Minnesota, and beyond.Drawing on decades of archival research, land deeds, city directories, census records, military rolls, and family photographs, Smith reconstructs the Jeffrey family’s remarkable, often heartbreaking journey across more than a century of American history. The book documents their early role in the abolitionist and civil rights movements in Connecticut and New York; their service in Black and mixed-race Union regiments during the Civil War, including the 102nd U.S. Colored Troops; their survival through the Dakota War of 1862; their endurance of marginalization, racial reclassification, and the 1920 Duluth lynching; and their quieter triumphs as barbers, horse trainers, church founders, musicians, and community pioneers, across generations in Minnesota, Michigan, North Dakota, and Chicago.