Buffalo Soldiers at Fort Sill

The Ninth and Tenth Cavalry Regiments, the African American units who came to be called Buffalo Soldiers, were stationed at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and Fort Larned, Kansas, during the Indian Wars campaigns of the eighteen sixties through the eighteen eighties. They were soldiers who had, within the decade before their service, either been enslaved themselves or had family members who were.

The Comanche and Cheyenne warriors they were sent against reportedly called them Buffalo Soldiers, a name that carried recognition of their fighting quality. The name has been carried forward with pride, into monuments and military history programs. The moral weight underneath it is more complicated than the monuments tend to acknowledge.

The Buffalo Soldiers were the military instrument of policies they did not make, enforcing removals, confining nations to reservations, and suppressing resistance that had its own legitimate foundation. They did this as men who knew what it meant to be confined and constrained by a government that did not recognize their full humanity, who were serving a country that had enslaved them and was still, in many states, denying them basic civic rights. They served at higher rates, in worse conditions, on more isolated postings than white units of equivalent rank, and earned among the lowest commendation rates despite documented performance.

The question of what the Buffalo Soldiers' service means is not one the record settles. It is one of the most honest paradoxes in post-Civil War American history: men fighting for inclusion in a nation by enforcing the exclusion of others. Fort Sill's National Historic Landmark section holds the history of both the soldiers who served here and the nations whose territory it commanded. The fort itself remains an active military installation.