Buffalo Soldiers in the West: A Black Soldiers Anthology

Western Black Soldiers since The Buffalo Soldiers: A Review of the Literature

brucea.glasrud WesternBlackSoldiers sinceThe Buffalo Soldiers areviewoftheliterature As recently freed black Americans moved westward in the decades after the Civil War, they sought employment opportunities and to escape from an oppressive racial environment. Some men became U.S. soldiers, named the buffalo soldiers by plains Indians, serving in the West. They were neglected by the white public and scholars for years, until William H. Leckie’s now-classic book, The Buffalo Soldiers, was published in 1967. Since then, a flood of scholarly and more general works investigating the life, careers, and roles of these black western soldiers has been produced. This study serves as an interpretive review of that literature. Even so, more research and writing is left to be accomplished. What is important to remember is that these soldiers served with distinction and valor, offered a source of pride to black Americans, and both faced and fought racial injustice in the West—even though the discrimination was not usually as virulent as that on the other side of the Mississippi River. During the late nineteenth century, beginning in the years immediately following the Civil War, free black Americans moved west in search of new, and better, opportunities. Among options open to black males was that of joining the regular army. That opportunity arose when in 1866 Congress authorized six regiments of the regular U.S. Army staffed by blacks—two cavalry and four infantry.1 By 1869, in an overall troop reduction, Congress cut the number of black infantry units to two, and potential black soldiers enlisted in either the Ninth or Tenth Cavalry, or the Twenty-fourth or Twenty-fifth Infantry. Dubbed the buffalo soldiers by plains Indians impressed with the black soldiers’ courage and valor as well as their visage and attire, the buffalo soldiers performed a crucial role in protecting settlers, in paving the way for peace, and in countering discrimination on the western frontier, in the process enabling a multicultural society in the West. Their contributions were significant , their challenges great, and their experiences varied but always tempered by the fact that they were black soldiers in “white” and “red” and “brown” territory. The earliest significant scholarly treatment of these black western soldiers arrived in 1967 with the University of Oklahoma Press publication of William H. Leckie’s The Buffalo Soldiers: A Narrative of the Negro Cavalry in the West. This now-classic study of the black cavalry in the late nineteenth century West, as the author put it, told “the story of the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry, in the conviction that they deserve recognition for what they were—first rate regiments by any standards one wishes to apply and major spearheads in the settlement of the West.”2 Leckie obviously used this approach and responded in part to rebut comments such as those of Paul T. Arnold, who, in the midst of an otherwise valuable and thorough six-part series (1910) on “Negro Soldiers in the United States Army,” remarked that “it is unnecessary to go into details in regard to the services of the negro troops in the West. The infantry was mainly engaged in garrison duty, the cavalry in Indian fights, none of which were very important.”3 However, subsequent writers and scholars recognized the import of what Leckie contended, and for the past forty years a growing and sophisticated study of black soldiers in the West continued to emerge. It is the purpose of this essay to delineate these works and to note the comments of Bruce Dinges in the New Mexico Historical Review who asserted: nor has the story of blacks in the frontier army been fully or adequately told. Until now [1991], historians have focused on narrative histories of the black infantry and cavalry, and these studies are two decades old. Students need to dig deeper into military records, the diaries and correspondences of white officers, contemporary newspapers , and other sources to explore the relationship between whites, blacks, and Indians in the West.4 Students and more advanced scholars accepted the challenge and have conducted and published numerous investigations during the past quarter century, which utilized those very sources for developing the story of the black soldier in the West. Leckie’s emphasis on the need for recognition of the black troops 6 introduction precipitated comments from a few authors such as Jack Forbes in his short study, Afro...