This page was written by Elbert Jackson and checked line by line by Geoffrey Middlebrooks, our troop historian, who taught American history for thirty-one years and does not let anything slide. We have kept to what is well established. Where historians disagree, we say so.

Black Americans fought in every one of this country's wars, beginning with the Revolution. In the Civil War, about 180,000 black men served in the Union Army in the regiments of the United States Colored Troops, most of them former slaves, and their service helped win the war and end slavery. But when the war ended, those regiments were mustered out. There was no place for black soldiers in the regular, peacetime Army.

In July 1866, Congress passed a law reorganizing the Army, and for the first time it created regiments in the regular Army in which the enlisted men would be black. There were six of them: two of cavalry, the 9th and 10th, and four of infantry, the 38th, 39th, 40th and 41st. In 1869, when the Army was made smaller, the four infantry regiments were combined into two, the 24th and 25th Infantry. Those four regiments, the 9th and 10th Cavalry and the 24th and 25th Infantry, are the ones we mean when we say Buffalo Soldiers.

The officers of the new regiments were white, and would be for years. The enlisted men came from everywhere: Union veterans, freedmen from the South, young men from the cities of the North. A private was paid thirteen dollars a month. Many of the recruits had never been allowed to learn to read, and the regiments' chaplains were given the duty of teaching them, which they did, in tents and barracks, after a full day's work.

The 10th Cavalry was organized at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, beginning in 1866, under Colonel Benjamin H. Grierson. Grierson had been a music teacher in Illinois before the Civil War, and he was said to be afraid of horses. He became one of the Union's finest cavalry officers anyway, and in 1863 led a famous raid hundreds of miles through Mississippi. He was determined that his new regiment would be a good one. He was careful about whom he recruited, he stood up for his men when they were treated unfairly by other officers, and he commanded the 10th for more than twenty years.

The regiment did not stay long at Fort Leavenworth. It moved out to Fort Riley and to posts in western Kansas and Indian Territory, which is now Oklahoma. Troopers of the 10th helped build Fort Sill. In the 1870s the regiment went to West Texas, and in the 1880s to Arizona. The 9th Cavalry, organized in Louisiana under Colonel Edward Hatch, served in Texas and New Mexico, and the 24th and 25th Infantry served all across the Southwest and the Plains.

Most of a frontier soldier's life was not fighting. It was work. The Buffalo Soldiers built and repaired forts with their own hands. They built roads and strung hundreds of miles of telegraph wire. They escorted stagecoaches, mail riders, wagon trains, railroad surveyors and cattle herds. They explored and mapped country that had never been mapped, found water holes in the desert, and chased horse thieves, cattle rustlers and outlaws.

They often got the hardest posts, the worst food and the oldest horses, some of them cast off by other regiments. Many white civilians in the towns near their forts treated them with contempt, and some officers refused to serve with them. Even so, the black regiments had some of the lowest desertion rates in the Army. Their soldiers reenlisted again and again. For a black man in the 1870s, the Army meant steady pay, a uniform that demanded a kind of respect, an education, and a chance to prove something to a country that doubted him.

The Buffalo Soldiers also fought in the Indian Wars, in campaigns against the Cheyenne, Comanche, Kiowa and Apache, among others. More than a dozen of them earned the Medal of Honor in those campaigns. We tell this part honestly in our programs. These were men who had just come out of slavery, serving a government that did not treat them as equals, in wars that took the land of other people who were not treated as equals either. It is not a simple story. It is a true one, and that is why it is worth telling.

Nobody knows for certain exactly when or where the name "Buffalo Soldiers" began, but it came from the Plains Indians who faced them, the Cheyenne and Comanche by most accounts. The usual explanation is that their dark, curly hair reminded the Indians of the buffalo's coat, and that their courage and toughness in a fight reminded them of the buffalo too, an animal they held in great respect. Whatever its exact origin, the soldiers understood the name as a compliment, and they wore it proudly. The 10th Cavalry put a buffalo on its regimental crest, and it is still there.

Henry O. Flipper was born into slavery in Georgia. In 1877 he became the first black graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, and he was assigned to the 10th Cavalry. In 1882, after a court-martial that many historians believe was unjust, he was dismissed from the Army. He spent the rest of his long life as an engineer, surveyor and translator in the Southwest and Mexico, and he never stopped trying to clear his name. This February, nearly sixty years after his death, President Clinton granted him a full pardon. Our troop had a small dinner that night, and Geoffrey gave the toast.

Charles Young graduated from West Point in 1889, the third black man to do so. He served with the 9th and 10th Cavalry and rose to the rank of colonel, the highest of any black officer of his day.

In 1898, when the United States went to war with Spain, all four Buffalo Soldier regiments were sent to Cuba. On July 1, 1898, in the fighting for the San Juan Heights outside Santiago, the 9th and 10th Cavalry charged up Kettle Hill alongside Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders, and the 24th and 25th Infantry fought nearby. Several Buffalo Soldiers earned the Medal of Honor in Cuba.

Afterward the regiments served in the Philippines, and in 1916 the 10th Cavalry rode into Mexico with the expedition sent after Pancho Villa. The horse cavalry's day was ending, though. During World War II the old horse regiments were broken up. In 1948 President Truman ordered the armed forces desegregated, and within a few years the all-black units were gone. Black and white soldiers have served side by side ever since, which is how Elbert served for twenty-two years, and which the Buffalo Soldiers made possible.

For teachers: if your class is studying the West, the Civil War or Reconstruction, the Buffalo Soldiers fit right in. Your school or public library will have books on them for every reading level, and we would be glad to come and bring the history to life. See our booking calendar.