Nicodemus, Kansas, a monument to the struggle, stamina, and resolve of former slaves to establish themselves as an entity apart, to prove they could stand alone as a culture, a society as American as the Declaration of Independence. With backbreaking toil, boundless courage and pride, they carved freedom and dignity from what for untold ages was worthless wasteland, and made it into the fertile "promised land" of Nicodemus.To that land of promise, in the spring of 1877, a former slave named Jeremiah Higgins (Big Boy) journeyed in search of his wife and sons whom he last saw when he was traded for a mule.