The Roughest Riders Read Free Page B

were intrigued by the black men’s dark skin and tight curly hair. Possibly, the truth is a combination of the two accounts. One Cheyenne warrior said that this new type of soldier had “a thick and shaggy mane of hair” and “fought like a cornered buffalo.” Also like a buffalo, he “suffered wound after wound, yet had not died.” In truth, the African Americans who signed up for service during the Indian Wars of the late nineteenth century quickly earned a reputation as some of the fiercest fighters the Native Americans had ever encountered.
    After the Civil War, the United States Colored Troops were organized into two regiments of black cavalry—the Ninth and Tenth—and four regiments of black infantry—the Thirty-Eighth, Thirty-Ninth, Fortieth, and Forty-First. The Tenth was the original, activated at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, in 1867. In April 1869, the Thirty-Ninth and Fortieth were regrouped as the Twenty-FourthInfantry Regiment, based in Fort Clark, Texas, which they regarded as a soldier’s paradise. “Beautiful rivers, grass and grassy plains, teemed with game,” wrote Captain William G. Muller, with the Twenty-Fourth. “The buffalo overran the plains in the autumn; immense herds of antelope, thousands of deer, wild turkeys, quail, duck, and geese were everywhere—not to speak of cattle run wild, by the thousands, free to everyone.”
    Seven months later, the Thirty-Eighth and Forty-First were combined into the Twenty-Fifth Infantry Regiment, stationed at Jackson Barracks in New Orleans. They were led mostly by white officers, although a handful of blacks were promoted into the officer ranks, among them Benjamin Grierson, first commander of the Tenth Cavalry; Edward Hatch, first commander of the Ninth; and Henry Flipper, the first black graduate of West Point. Flipper was the seventh African American to enter the military academy, where he encountered a measure of public racism from some white cadets who otherwise treated him with respect in private. “In short, there is a fearful lack of backbone,” he wrote home. The whites for the most part were afraid to befriend him in front of other whites and ostracized him from their clubs. “There was no society for me to enjoy—no friends, male or female, for me to visit, or with whom I could have any social intercourse, so absolute was my isolation.” He was simply “the colored cadet.”
    In July 1875, sections of the Tenth Cavalry and the Twenty-Fourth and Twenty-Fifth Infantries were put under the command of Colonel William R. Shafter, a future general who directed them on a famous expedition across the plains through Comanche territory and who would later lead them into war in Cuba.
    Various wars raged on for the better part of three decades, with black soldiers fighting alongside their white brothers in combat throughout the southwestern United States and up through the endless expanses of the Great Plains region. Over the courseof innumerable campaigns, thirteen black enlisted men and six black officers earned the Medal of Honor, and countless other African Americans pitched in to support their nation with grunt labor that included developing roads, constructing buildings, and delivering mail.

    After the Civil War, the US Colored Troops were eventually organized into two cavalry and two infantry regiments, including the Twenty-Fifth Infantry, which was given the name Buffalo Soldiers by the Indians they fought out west.
    Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (LC-DIG-ppmsca-11406)
    In 1892, President Benjamin Harrison dispatched black troops to Wyoming during the storied Johnson County War, which climaxed in a shootout between large, wealthy, settled ranchers and small farmers more recent to the area. A band of Buffalo Soldiers headquartered in Fort Robinson, Nebraska, rode northwest by train to Gillette, in the northeastern corner of Wyoming, and from there