Thirteen Dollars a Month and Half a Continent to Patrol

The deal was thirteen dollars a month, a five-year enlistment, and a horse that another outfit had often already worn down. That was the offer to the men who signed up for the new Black cavalry regiments in 1866. Thousands took it.

Congress had authorized them that July. The Army Reorganization Act of 1866 created six all-Black regular regiments, two of cavalry (the 9th and 10th) and four of infantry. The infantry were later folded into two, the 24th and 25th. Many of the first recruits were Civil War veterans, and many were freedmen. Some had never held a book, much less a carbine.

The 10th formed at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, under Colonel Benjamin Grierson. Grierson had been a music teacher before the war, and by most accounts he'd disliked horses since one kicked him as a boy. He then led one of the great cavalry raids of the Civil War, 600 miles through Mississippi in 1863. A man who could do that could build a regiment. The 9th formed in New Orleans under Colonel Edward Hatch and went to Texas.

The name

The Plains tribes gave them the name Buffalo Soldiers. Historians still argue about exactly which tribe and exactly why. The usual explanations are the soldiers' dark, tightly curled hair and the way they fought, and the buffalo was a creature the Plains peoples respected. The soldiers took it as honor. The 10th Cavalry later put a buffalo on its regimental crest.

The work nobody paints

The paintings show charges. Most of the job was dull, dry and dangerous in the ordinary way.

They escorted stagecoaches and mail. They guarded survey parties and railroad crews. They strung telegraph wire, cut roads and built and rebuilt forts, among them Fort Davis and Fort Concho in Texas. They scouted country that had barely been mapped.

It could kill you without a shot being fired. In 1877 Captain Nicholas Nolan took 10th Cavalry troopers onto the Llano Estacado of West Texas after Comanche raiders. The guides lost the water. By most accounts four men died of thirst before the column staggered out.

Out on that country, discipline mattered more than courage. Leckie's The Buffalo Soldiers (1967), still the standard narrative, documents that desertion ran lower in the Black regiments than in white ones. Post chaplains also doubled as schoolteachers, and men who enlisted unable to read left able to. Those men finished what they signed up for, with worse gear and worse treatment than their neighbors in the next barracks.

The fighting

They fought a long list of Indian Wars campaigns, and they fought well. In 1879 and 1880 the 9th and 10th chased the Apache leader Victorio across West Texas and New Mexico, a hard pursuit of a skilled enemy over bad ground. In September 1879 a column under Major Thomas Thornburgh was ambushed by Utes at Milk Creek, Colorado. Thornburgh was killed and the survivors were pinned down for days. Troop D of the 9th Cavalry made a hard night march and broke in to relieve them.

In 1889 a paymaster named Joseph Wham was ambushed in Arizona by robbers who took the payroll. His escort was Black infantrymen of the 24th and 25th. Sergeant Benjamin Brown and Corporal Isaiah Mays were both wounded. Brown kept fighting. Mays walked for help despite his wounds. Both received the Medal of Honor. If you want the wider list of men like them, the Medal of Honor men you should be able to name is a good place to start.

Be honest about the other side of it. These soldiers were carrying out federal policy against Native nations that were defending their homes. Brave men stood on both sides of those fights, and a fair telling says so.

The hard parts

The country didn't return the loyalty.

Henry Flipper graduated from West Point in 1877, the first Black graduate, and went to the 10th Cavalry. At Fort Davis in 1881 his commissary accounts came up short. A court-martial acquitted him of embezzlement but convicted him of conduct unbecoming an officer for his handling of it. He was dismissed from the Army and spent the rest of his life trying to clear his name. Whether he was a careless bookkeeper who told a clumsy lie or a man some officers wanted gone, historians still argue. The Army's own record shows he was cleared of theft. President Clinton pardoned him posthumously in 1999.

Texas towns were often hostile to the troopers, and the soldiers learned to keep their tempers because the consequences fell on them first.

The worst came in 1906. After a night of shooting in Brownsville, Texas, left one man dead and a police officer wounded, townspeople blamed soldiers of the 25th Infantry stationed at Fort Brown. No soldier confessed. President Theodore Roosevelt, who had fought beside the Black regiments in Cuba, dismissed 167 of them without honor. Some had decades of service. The Army reversed the order in 1972 and granted honorable discharges. Most of the men were long dead.

Cuba, the parks and the rest

In July 1898 the 9th and 10th Cavalry charged Kettle Hill outside Santiago, Cuba, alongside Roosevelt's Rough Riders and the 1st Cavalry. Soldiers of the 10th also earned Medals of Honor in that war. Roosevelt wrote admiringly of them in print, in the condescending way of the day.

Buffalo Soldiers served in the Philippines. They patrolled Yosemite and Sequoia in the years before the National Park Service existed. They built trails and roads and fought fires. In 1903 Captain Charles Young of the 9th served as acting superintendent of Sequoia, the first Black man to lead a national park. Young was the third Black graduate of West Point. In 1917 the Army retired him on medical grounds, just as he was in line for brigadier general. To prove he was fit, he rode horseback from Ohio to Washington, roughly 500 miles. The Army kept the retirement.

The 10th Cavalry rode with Pershing into Mexico in 1916. The Army didn't fully integrate until after President Truman's Executive Order 9981 in 1948. The last known Buffalo Soldier, Mark Matthews, died in 2005 at the age of 111.

If you want other stories of unglamorous work done well, try the men who built your ordinary Tuesday. And for a lesson in leading from the front of the line, Washington slept in a tent until his men had roofs.

These men signed a five-year contract with a country that hadn't yet decided to honor them. They honored it first.