Child of the Fighting Tenth: On the Frontier with the Buffalo Soldiers (review)

Daughter of 10th Cavalry officer Charles L. Cooper and his wife Flora Green Cooper, Forrestine C. Hooker wrote nine novels about her childhood and early life. She died in 1932 at age sixty-five while completing her memoir, which described her childhood years accompanying her father’s regiment. The work was largely forgotten, save for a 1963 master’s thesis by Barbara E. Fisher, until edited by Steve Wilson and published in 2003 by Oxford University Press, where it was then allowed to go out of print. The present edition, supplemented with a new foreword by the editor, makes this little gem of a work available in paperback form to a broader audience.

Born in 1867, Forrestine, known as “Birdie” to the officers, enlisted men, and dependents of the 10th Cavalry, spent most of her childhood with the army. Her story is in many ways that of the frontier regulars, as—save for a brief hiatus at a Philadelphia finishing school—she accompanied her father, family, and regiment to Camp Supply, Fort Sill, Fort Concho, Fort Davis, Fort Grant, and the subpost at Camp Bonita. In 1886, she left the military community to marry the son of a prominent Arizona rancher. Written long after the fact, Hooker’s memoirs are written through the romantic lens of a Victorian lady, and reflect the racist language and stereotypes typical for the period. Otherwise, the stories and descriptions generally ring true, offering an unequaled child’s eye view of army life. Themes of race, gender, and class are often evident, and her memoirs serve as a powerful reminder of the fierce loyalties the men and women had for their individual regiments of the old army. In addition to her discussions of garrison life and society, her account of the campaigns against Geronimo in 1886 reveals especially intriguing details about those operations. Most poignant, however, is her story of her brief romance with a dashing lieutenant of the regiment, Powhatan H. Clarke, which ended abruptly amidst a miscarriage of letters and youthful pride.

A new preface accompanies this edition, which also boasts a brief introduction, short chronology, and list of places to visit. The book would have been better served with a revised introduction, however, as recent scholarship by Thomas D. Phillips and William Dobak, Charles Kenner, Paul Carlson, Anni P. Baker, and Michele J. Nacy on African American soldiers and army wives might have allowed for a more modern historical contextualization of Hooker’s work. Sadly, the brief index is incomplete and misleading, as names of key persons and things comprising important chunks of the text—the ship Selma, Texas governor Edmund J. Davis, Private George Clark (who acted as the family’s servant and very well might have saved Forrestine and her mother’s lives), and Fredericksburg’s Nimitz Hotel, to name a few—do not appear. Thus only the most meticulous of scholars will glean all of the insights and information contained in these unique reminiscences.