Buffalo Soldiers in the West: A Black Soldiers Anthology

Part III - Discrimination and Violence

part III DiscriminationandViolence Discrimination and violence are no strangers to the nation nor to the American West. Individual citizens and groups in frontier communities without a constituted legal authority often took the law into their own hands. Discrimination and violence were endemic to these settlements and did not require a specific racial, ethnic, or cultural admixture to manifest itself. Human desires and selfish interests were ever present as groups and individuals vied for power, wealth, and control. Into this unsettled and unsettling environment rode the buffalo soldiers , with orders to maintain a peace that never existed and a peace fiercely resisted by nearly every sector of society. In James N. Leiker’s “Black Soldiers at Fort Hays, Kansas, 1867–1869: A Study in Civilian and Military Violence,” (Great Plains Quarterly 17, no. 1 [Winter 1997]: 3–17) the writer states that the dangers buffalo soldiers faced in town and at the fort exceeded the dangers faced on the battlefield. The town of Hays City, an offspring of Fort Hays, attracted a rough crowd that provided the illicit entertainment and much of the mayhem that the Thirty-eighth Infantry and Tenth cavalry was to experience in western Kansas. Hays City, a paradox for the buffalo soldiers, obligated them to provide police protection for the town and recreate with the same locals in a manner that often disturbed the peace. The isolated location, the small population, and a low level of civil authority combined with a racial mixture that tested the notion of a “liberal” Kansas. According to Leiker, an assorted amalgam of black soldiers, former Confederates, saloon keepers, gamblers, prostitutes, and a variety of deadbeats produced an explosive en- vironment. Between 1867 and 1874, Hays City recorded over thirty homicides with nearly half involving conflicts between soldiers and civilians. Black-white violence and the lynching of three buffalo soldiers helped contribute to Hays City’s reputation as especially dangerous for blacks; however, the violence did not decrease when white soldiers replaced them. Violence in frontier towns was more than the sum of its parts and defied simple racial explanations. Black soldiers at frontier settlements heard epithets and ugly expressions on a regular basis. While discrimination and violence were not limited to these distant outposts, Frank N. Schubert in “Black Soldiers on the White Frontier: Some Factors Influencing Race Relations” (Phylon 32, no. 4 [Winter 1971]: 410–17) adds another dimension to the issue. While Schubert acknowledges discrimination, bigotry, and violence as common experiences for buffalo soldiers, he suggests that mitigating circumstances critically affected the intensity and virulence of those conflicts . The difference between hostile, benign, or even friendly relations in frontier communities was related to the size of the town, the presence of a local black population, and the town’s relative proximity to an Indian reservation. The presence of an Indian reservation seemed not to relate to fears of Indians hostilities, but the social position of the Indians as the town’s “niggers.”The buffalo soldiers gained a higher-ranked status since the Indians made up the bottom rung of the social-racial order. Garna L. Christian in “Rio Grande City: Prelude to the Brownsville Raid” (West Texas Historical Association Yearbook 57 [1981]: 118–32) cites turn-of-the-century black self-confidence’s collision with waxing white supremacy. Christian further adds another factor to relations in the Rio Grande valley: the presence of a three-tiered social order. Some Mexican Americans reasoned that to achieve a measure more social status and mobility than newly arriving African Americans required the assumption of an orthodox racist position consistent with white Anglo leadership. The efforts of Mexicans to avoid the lowest social position exacerbated tensions between themselves and the buffalo soldiers. Tensions between black soldiers and Mexicans were coupled with hostilities of Texans who hated the federal government in general and black military representatives of that government in particular. A lingering fear of black retaliation among Texans also may have been ignited by the sight of black men with guns. A third factor was tied to the fact that the Rio Grande was a border region, a historic place of violence and disorder . Lax law enforcement made the Rio Grande area attractive to a va154 part III riety of renegade Indians, bandits, and outlaw gangs. It was in this environment where any and every buffalo soldier action was...