The Soldiers Who Guarded the Parks Before the Parks Had Rangers

When Sequoia National Park was established in eighteen ninety and Yosemite in the same year, there was no National Park Service. That agency would not exist for another twenty-six years. In the interim, the U.S. Army was assigned to protect the parks from poachers, illegal grazing, and fire.

The Army units sent to do this work from eighteen ninety-nine to nineteen four were the Ninth Cavalry and the Twenty-Fourth Infantry, Buffalo Soldiers, Black men serving in a segregated military under white officers. They drove out the sheep ranchers whose flocks were destroying the meadows. They extinguished wildfires that would have swept through stands of sequoias. They built roads and trails. They conducted the first systematic wildlife surveys of either park, producing records of species populations that researchers still consult. They enforced the law in a landscape so remote that there was no other institutional presence within riding distance.

In nineteen three, Captain Charles Young commanded the detail at Sequoia. Young was among the most accomplished officers in the U.S. Army by any objective measure: West Point graduate, decorated combat veteran, one of the highest-ranking Black officers in the service. His patrol logged hundreds of miles that summer over terrain that tested horses and men equally.

For most of the twentieth century, their service appeared in none of the standard park histories. The narrative presented to visitors described the parks as having been established and protected by white rangers and white conservationists. The Buffalo Soldiers were not mentioned in the interpretive materials at Yosemite's visitor center until the nineteen nineties. A monument to them was finally erected at the Sequoia and Kings Canyon entrance in twenty thirteen.

What the monument does not fully capture is the double bind of their position. These men were protecting a landscape they could not freely visit as civilians, serving in a military that enforced their legal subordination, doing the foundational work of an institution that would eventually credit others for doing it. That history is more complicated than a monument can hold. But the monument is here now, near the entrance where you came in, and it acknowledges what the parks owe.