The Buffalo Soldier Heritage Troop of Kansas City is a living history group. We portray the enlisted men of the 10th United States Cavalry, one of the regiments of black soldiers who served on the Western frontier after the Civil War, and the women who lived and worked with them on the Army posts. We wear their uniforms, carry their equipment, ride in their saddles, and tell their story to anyone who will listen: schoolchildren, church groups, veterans, parade crowds, and the occasional surprised family at a gas station.

We are Elbert and Maria Jackson, and we started the troop in 1994 with four friends and one borrowed horse. Elbert enlisted in the Army in 1963, served in Vietnam, and retired in 1985 as a sergeant first class after twenty-two years. He now works nights at a postal processing center, which leaves his days free for this. Maria is a school nurse, and she sews most of the troop's period clothing on a machine in our dining room, where we have not eaten a meal since about 1995. She portrays a company laundress.

We are not historians by training. We are people who learned this history late, and got angry that we had not learned it in school, and decided that the children of Kansas City would not have to wait as long as we did. The 10th Cavalry was born thirty miles from here. That is reason enough.

Every program we give ends with the same question from a child: "Were there any girls?" There was one we know of. Cathay Williams was born into slavery in Missouri, a Missouri girl like a lot of the children we visit. During the Civil War she worked for the Union Army as a cook and laundress. In November 1866, in St. Louis, she enlisted in the Army as a man, under the name William Cathay, and served in the 38th Infantry, one of the original black regiments, in New Mexico. She served for nearly two years before an Army surgeon discovered she was a woman, and she was discharged in 1868. Years later, in 1891, she applied for a disability pension for her service. It was denied.

She is the only woman known to have served as a Buffalo Soldier. In our programs, Lorraine Stevens tells Cathay's story in the first person, as Cathay might have told it in 1891, sitting in a kitchen in Colorado and waiting to hear about her pension. When she finishes, nobody in the room says anything for a while.

For more than a hundred years there was no monument to the Buffalo Soldiers at the post where the 10th Cavalry was born. That changed on July 25, 1992, when a bronze statue of a mounted trooper was dedicated at Fort Leavenworth. General Colin Powell, who had started the effort to build it when he was stationed at Fort Leavenworth in the early 1980s, came back as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to dedicate it.

We were there, in the crowd, in our own clothes. Elbert says that was the day the troop really started, though it took us two more years to buy a saddle. If you visit Fort Leavenworth, go see it. Stand where the trooper is looking. Then go to the national cemetery on the post, where many Buffalo Soldiers are buried, and say their names.

See our booking calendar for open dates this fall.

New members are welcome, men and women, of any background, sixteen and up (younger with a parent in the troop). No experience is needed, only a willingness to learn the history and to stand up straight in wool in August. We meet the second Sunday of every month after church.

Who Were the Buffalo Soldiers? · Our Kit & Booking Calendar

To book a program or ask a question, write to
[email protected]


visitors since June 1998

Last updated September 22, 1999