Buffalo Soldiers in the West: A Black Soldiers Anthology

Preface

preface This anthology—Buffalo Soldiers in the West: A Black Soldiers Anthology— is the result of a collaborative effort by two historians, Bruce A. Glasrud and Michael N. Searles, colleagues who became acquainted with each other while attending western history meetings over the years. During that time they discussed various aspects of African American western history such as black cowboys, white violence and intimidation, black soldiers, and the history of African Americans in the Lone Star State. Both Searles and Glasrud have been interested in the black soldiers in the West, Searles as a result of conversations with Frank N. Schubert as well as Searles’ involvement with re-enactment groups on the campus of Augusta State University, and Glasrud as a result of friendship and initial encouragement on studying the buffalo soldiers from William H. Leckie, subsequent conversations with James N. Leiker and Paul H. Carlson, and Glasrud’s eight-year residence near Fort Davis. With that foundation, this book focuses on the buffalo soldiers, the African Americans in the latter years of the nineteenth and early twentieth century who were primarily engaged in soldiering in the western United States. They compiled a proud and honorable, albeit difficult and rigorous, record on the racial and military frontier of the United States. They reckoned with racism, they spent much of their military service on a violent and often lawless frontier, and they struggled to make a better, more equitable life for themselves in the U.S. West. As Frank “Mickey” Schubert put it in his essay, “Buffalo Soldiers: Myths and Realities:” of primary importance is the fact that buffalo soldiers participated in major mainstream American processes, the expansion of the United States and its populations and the displacement of native peoples. At the same time, because of white racism and the discrimination that it spawned, they performed their duties and lived the lives of soldiers under conditions that were peculiarly trying (p. 4). The name buffalo soldiers was first applied to the black western soldiers as a descriptive phrase to the black cavalry, in particular the Tenth Cavalry (which eventually led to a patch of honor that the Tenth Cavalrymen wore on their sleeves), then to the Ninth, and then to the infantrymen as well. Black soldiers served in most previous military conflicts in U.S. history: the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Civil War. However, not until the end of the Civil War were black troops able to enlist in the peacetime regular army. They served well, and by the end of the nineteenth century they engaged in the Spanish-American War, early in the twentieth century in the Filipino-American War, and prior to World War I they went with Gen. “Black Jack” Pershing on his campaign into Mexico. Racism once more reared its ugly head during World War I: Those black soldiers who actually fought served not under U.S. command and flag, but under the French, while nearly ninety percent of black soldiers were placed in non-fighting labor battalions. Despite an unfortunate popular and scholarly assumption that little is known or written about the buffalo soldiers, they have indeed received considerable attention from scholars of the military, and of social and cultural movements alike. Through such efforts as William Leckie’s The Buffalo Soldiers, re-enactment groups, the superb publications of Frank Schubert, ceremonies at Fort Leavenworth, the career of Gen. Colin Powell, movies, and a host of additional articles and books published over the past forty years, information on the buffalo soldiers has been well distributed. Most of the latter books and articles are discussed in Bruce Glasrud’s essay introducing this collection as well as included in the chapter (with William H. Leckie), “Buffalo Soldiers,” in Glasrud’s bibliography, The African American West. So, one might ask, what does this anthology add to the existing body of work? Our purpose is to make available in one easily located collection the results of scholarly investigation into the lives, activities, and responsibilities of the black soldiers in the western United States. We also developed this collection to offer readers the variety and depth of historical studies published about these soldiers. The anthology provides readers with an awareness of the interesting experiences of the black military in the West following the Civil War. Moreover, although much has been written about the military exploits of these African American soldiers, coverage of...