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

On opening Child of the Fighting Tenth, I was delighted to discover that Forrestine C. Hooker (I thought the name sounded familiar) was the author of two of my childhood favorites, Star: The Story of an Indian Pony (1922) and Cricket: Little Girl of the Old West (1925). In fact, after the publication of her first story, in 1904, when she was thirty-seven years old, Hooker went on to publish about a hundred stories and nine novels, including the tales of Star and Cricket, which I loved. From 1921, when the idea of writing a memoir was suggested to her, Hooker worked on and off until her death in 1932 at what would become Child of the Fighting Tenth. Her largely forgotten manuscript of several hundred pages has now been sensitively edited by Steve Wilson, Director Emeritus of the Museum of the Great Plains in Lawton, Oklahoma.

Hooker's father, Charles Lawrence Cooper, was in 1867 appointed first lieutenant of Company A in the newly formed black Tenth Cavalry. Sent to Kansas to protect Kansas Pacific Railroad workers from the Plains Indians, the Tenth got its nickname, the Buffalo Soldiers, from Comanches who thought their hair resembled the hair of the buffalo. During their years on the frontier, as editor Wilson points out, "the black regiments consistently enjoyed higher reenlistments, and fewer desertions, than any of the white regiments. By the end of the Indian wars ... eighteen African-American soldiers and four of their officers from the black regiments received the Medal of Honor for bravery under fire" (13). One of those officers was Lieutenant Powhatan Clarke, whom the young Forrestine Cooper loved and lost but remembered all her life.

Little "Birdie" Cooper, with her mother and younger siblings, followed Lieutenant Cooper from fort to fort throughout the West, beginning with Fort Dodge, Kansas, in 1871 and ending at Fort Grant, Arizona, in 1886, when nineteen-year-old Birdie, as she was known in the family, married Edwin Russell Hooker, son of the cattle baron Henry Clay Hooker. During those years, Birdie witnessed history, including the surrender of Quanah Parker and the campaign against Geronimo. But more important to her than these dramatic events was the day-to-day pleasure of being a child on an isolated military fort, with ponies to ride, stories to savor, and the devotion of officers and troopers alike. It is this portrait of a remarkable childhood which makes Child of the Fighting Tenth so memorable: detailed, often humorous, and finally poignant, as when Birdie, just married to Edwin Hooker and making the twenty-seven-mile journey to Willcox, Arizona, to catch the eastbound Southern Pacific train, happens to meet her father's troop of cavalry. "Sergeant Finnegan led my horse, Don, so that I could see that he was all right, and Don poked at my hand, but I had not the usual lump of sugar that day. Each soldier of the troop shook hands with me, and I knew that some of them had tears in their eyes. ... I wanted to go back with them, back to the old troop, with its familiar black faces, back to the garrison. ... I went back to the buggy" (224-26).

As editor Wilson acknowledges, although Hooker witnessed the plight of the Native Americans and was sympathetic, she "grew up in a different time, far removed from the racial sensitivity of our modern era. ... [S]uch descriptions as colored, Negro, squaws, or greaser, were never intended to slight or demean, but were simply common usage of the day" (16). The memoir also contains frustrating omissions. Why did her father forbid her to continue seeing Powhatan Clarke? What was the nature of the marriage that left Hooker in tears on her wedding day? However, Child of the Fighting Tenth is an important historical record and an engaging story of a little girl's experience as an army...