Buffalo Soldiers in the West: A Black Soldiers Anthology

Fort Riley’s Black Soldiers and the Army’s Changing Role in the West, 1867–85

williama.dobak FortRiley’sBlackSoldiers andtheArmy’sChangingRole intheWest,1867–85 At the end of the Civil War, the U.S. Army faced three major strategic challenges. The states of the former Confederacy required a military occupation force. South of the Rio Grande, Mexican nationalist forces were fighting a French army of occupation, which created turmoil along the border. Transportation routes westward to the Pacific Coast, and to recently developed goldfields in Montana and Colorado, also required protection. To meet these needs, the regular army mustered a force that numbered, by law, fewer than forty thousand men. Part of the solution to these new problems was to enlarge the army and increase available manpower by enlisting black soldiers in the regular army for the first time. Before the Civil War the regular army had accepted no black recruits, but Republicans in Congress noticed the satisfactory performance of the black volunteers—more than 175,000 of them—who had served in the U.S. colored troops during the war. When the appropriation act of 1866 provided for an expanded army, it specified that four regiments of infantry and two of cavalry would be “composed of colored men.”1 As it turned out, both of the black cavalry regiments passed through Kansas and furnished part of Fort Riley’s garrison during the next two decades. The years they spent at the fort—the Tenth Cavalry in 1867 and 1868 and the Ninth from 1881 to 1885—bracketed an epoch in the military history of the American West. The army’s duties in the West changed during these years, and the black regiments’ service at Fort Riley exemplified that change. Although Fort Riley had been the westernmost fort on the central route to Colorado during the gold rush of 1859, by the mid-1860s it no longer was an isolated frontier post. The fort and its twenty-thousandacre military reservation lay close to major transportation routes, a few days’ march from the Platte River to the north and to the Arkansas River to the south. The Kansas state census of 1865 counted 3,002 residents in adjacent Davis (now Geary) and Riley counties. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, on a tour of inspection in the summer of 1866, remarked that “the country out as far as Fort Riley is as much a settled country as Illinois and Missouri.” What, then, justified keeping the post open?2 A few weeks before Sherman’s visit; the commanding officer, Maj. John W. Davidson, had pondered the fort’s future: As a station of troops . . . in [the] event of Indian hostilities Fort Riley has lost its importance, settlements being well in advance of it on both the Smokey [sic] Hill and Republican Rivers. But as a Depot for the supply of the posts in our western Territories . . . is of great importance to the Government. This should be, in my opinion, the Cavalry Depot of the West. The Government owns a large reserve here; the facilities for grazing are unsurpassed in the West. . . . The remount horses of all the cavalry Posts . . . should be kept here. The broken down stock, instead of being condemned or sold at the posts, should be conducted here for recuperation.3 It would be eighteen years before the army’s high command followed Davidson’s recommendation and ten beyond that before the Mounted Branch School—for cavalry and horse-drawn field artillery—opened. In the meantime, cost-conscious military leaders used Fort Riley as a winter dormitory for troops whose summer campaigns took them far to the west and south, often by rail. Railroads enabled the troops to travel farther and faster than ever before.4 To keep open the central transportation corridor between the Arkansas and Platte rivers, the federal government negotiated new treaties with the Plains tribes. When the Cheyennes and Arapahos signed the Treaty of Medicine Lodge in October 1867, they “reserve[d] the right to hunt on any lands south of the Arkansas as long as the buffalo may range thereon in such numbers as to justify the chase.” The following spring the Sioux reserved the right to hunt buffalo on the Republican River, in an identically worded clause of the treaty they signed at Fort Laramie. The Medicine Lodge and Fort Laramie treaties were intended to assure the whites of a central region, free of Indians, through which railroads 36 williama.dobak could pass to California, Colorado...