Buffalo Soldiers: Black Cavalry in the Texas Interior

Congress authorized the Buffalo Soldiers in July of eighteen sixty-six, about fifteen months after the end of the Civil War, and almost immediately stationed them at the most remote and contested posts in the American interior.

The Ninth and Tenth Cavalry and the Twenty-Fourth and Twenty-Fifth Infantry were the Army's four Black regiments, commanded by white officers, assigned to the frontier posts of West Texas through the eighteen sixties, seventies, and eighties. Fort Davis in the Davis Mountains of Trans-Pecos Texas and Fort Concho at present-day San Angelo were their primary bases. Their assignment was to protect Anglo settlers and the roads and railroads pushing into territory that Comanche, Apache, and Kiowa peoples had occupied for generations, peoples who were fighting to remain on their land.

The name Buffalo Soldiers was given to them by the Comanche and other Indigenous fighters who faced them. The etymology is debated: some accounts connect it to the perceived similarity between the soldiers' dark curly hair and the fur of the buffalo, others to the fighters' tenacious resilience, which Indigenous warriors compared to the buffalo's determined strength. The soldiers themselves adopted the name with pride. It is now carried by the Buffalo Soldier National Museum in Houston and by annual commemorations across the country.

The historical situation was layered in ways that do not resolve into a simple story. These were Black men, many of them former enslaved people or sons of enslaved people, serving an institution that had itself subjected Black Americans to centuries of violence. Their assignment was to clear land for white settlement using methods not unlike those that had displaced their own communities. They served with documented valor. They served an unjust purpose. Both things are true, and Fort Davis, the most complete surviving Buffalo Soldier fort in the American Southwest, holds both in the same silence.