By Lazarus Letcher
Illustrations by Adri Norris

“Can the class touch your hair?”

I was sitting in my high school sophomore year of U.S. History when I first heard of the Buffalo Soldiers. It was a rare moment in my Indiana education when we touched on African American history that took us beyond or outside of victimhood. My teacher’s question quickly dashed my joy at this rare reflection of myself in my curriculum.

“Can we touch your hair to understand where their name comes from?”

I and the two other Black classmates locked eyes and telepathically agreed that, at least for today, we would not be a petting zoo.

There’s some debate about exactly where the term for the segregated African American troops fighting in the timespan post–Civil War, through the Spanish-American War, and up until World War II came from. Many, like my misguided teacher, assume the name comes from the natural texture of our hair. The Buffalo Soldiers National Museum claims the name also referenced their fierce fighting style. What most accounts seem to agree on is that the name of the Black Cavalry Regiment was given to them by the Indigenous communities they fought.

African Americans, both enslaved and free, fought and died for the United States long before the official formation of all-Black regiments. The soldiers of the 10th Cavalry Regiment, created at Fort Leavenworth in 1866, are considered the first Buffalo Soldiers. They were followed by an additional cavalry regiment and three infantry regiments. Several Black soldiers fought for the Union army, but the Buffalo Soldiers were the first peacetime all-Black units, making up about ten percent of the U.S. Army. The Buffalo Soldiers were essential to the Westward Expansion project: building roads, hanging telegraph lines, clearing out illegal settlements, escorting wagon trains, and even acting as some of the first National Park rangers. They were often given the most challenging assignments, low-quality or faulty equipment and uniforms, and sometimes faced hostility in the towns where they were placed.

These soldiers were based throughout the Southwest, including New Mexico—playing a key role in our transformation from territory to state. An estimated four thousand Buffalo Soldiers served across eleven posts in the New Mexico Territory, especially in the south. They fought in several battles against the Apache, even engaging with Apache Chief Victorio close to what is now the White Sands Missile Range. They were also tasked with keeping the peace amid heavily armed battles between residents in the Colfax and Lincoln County Wars.
Several members of the 9th Cavalry received Medals of Honor—
in fact, the only troops stationed at Fort Union to receive this achievement were Buffalo Soldiers. The 9th Cavalry Band musicians were especially known for their musical prowess and were stationed at several New Mexico posts, even performing for President Rutherford B. Hayes during his 1880 visit to Santa Fe.

The focus of the Buffalo Soldiers shifted from the American Frontier to abroad during the Spanish-American War in 1898 when the 9th and 10th Cavalry landed in Cuba on June 22, 1898, without their horses. Transitioning from horseback combat to a new country and new fighting style must have been jarring. Buffalo Soldiers fought alongside the Rough Riders and Theodore Roosevelt at the Battle of San Juan Hill, losing twenty-six of their men. One Rough Rider, Frank Knox, said of the Buffalo Soldiers, “I never saw braver men anywhere.” As the Spanish-American War progressed into the Philippine-American War, Buffalo Soldiers were sent to the Philippines, where they struggled to fight for a country that didn’t fight for them.

Several Buffalo Soldiers wrote home to Black newspapers to describe the racism they saw Filipinos facing at the hands of white American troops. Sergeant Patrick Mason of the 24th wrote, “I feel sorry for these people and all those that have come under the control of the U.S.” The feeling was mutual, with Filipino fighters creating fliers targeting Buffalo Soldiers, asking them why they’d fight for a nation that murders them in cold blood back home. One reads,

To the Colored American Soldier: It is without honor that you shed your precious blood. Your masters have thrown you in the most iniquitous fight with double purpose—to make you the instrument of their ambition, and also, your hard work will soon make the extinction of your race. Your friends, the Filipinos, give you this good warning. You must consider your situation and your history and take charge that the blood of Sam Hose [a recently lynched Black man in Newton, Georgia] proclaims vengeance.

Some Buffalo Soldiers were fed up with the racism, defected and joined the Filipino troops, most famously Corporal David Fagen, who rose to the level of Captain.

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As the descendant of a stolen people on a stolen land, I’ve struggled with this history. What choices or opportunities did we have post-Emancipation? What relationships did we have with Indigenous communities beyond or beside the Buffalo Soldiers’ role in Westward Expansion and imperial endeavors? I’ve had Black ancestors fight in every war since the Civil War, many of them labeled Buffalo Soldiers. What were their motivations? How did white leadership treat them? Did they know how they would be treated when they were discharged?

Scholar and professor of Black Studies at Northwestern University, Sylvester Johnson says of Buffalo Soldiers, “With few exceptions, they fought on behalf of a violently expanding US empire to make war against American Indians and to control what should have been self-governing sovereign polities of Indian nations… It became for African American men an imperial and patriarchal mode of pursuing national belonging.” Most Buffalo Soldiers’ histories stress the few opportunities for African American men post-Emancipation for employment. When it came to African American women, the options were even more dire. Is this why Cathay Williams decided to change her name and don a uniform?

Cathay Williams:  The Woman Buffalo Soldier

We know little about Cathay Williams beyond the scant military records and one newspaper interview she gave in 1876, and the information and dates are often conflicting. Black history is so
often missing due to the legacy of scarce records from enslavement and the anti-literacy laws that made it illegal for most African Americans to write our own stories. We do know that Williams enlisted in Missouri on November 15, 1866, a year after the signing of the Thirteenth Amendment that abolished slavery except “as punishment for a crime,” to join the ranks of the 38th Volunteer Infantry Regiment. She said she was born in 1842 and listed Independence, Missouri, as her place of birth. She was born to a free man and an enslaved mother, and due to the seventeenth-century legal doctrine Partus sequitur ventrem, this enslaved Williams automatically.

Williams was involved with the army before her enlistment—
potentially not of her own free will. In 1861, Williams worked for the Union army as “contraband.” In 1861, the U.S. Congress decided that any African Americans who self-emancipated would not be returned to their enslavers if they made it to Union lines. “Contraband” was a term typically used to describe stolen goods, which further demonstrates that while the Civil War was a fight for Emancipation, African Americans were still viewed legally as objects by many on both sides. Some historical accounts paint the picture of contraband African Americans as paid and appreciated by the Union, while Union officials like General Butler openly referred to them as slaves and did not pay them. According to Williams, her experience was closer to the latter. Some of these African Americans, like Williams, were not self-emancipators but “confiscated property.”

In her interview with the Denver News, Williams said of this experience, “…when the war broke out and the United States soldiers came to Jefferson City, they took me and other colored folks with them to Little Rock. Col. Benton of the 13th Army Corps was the officer that carried us off. I did not want to go.” She witnessed the burning of cotton fields throughout the South, the capture of Rebel gunboats in Shreveport, and General Philip Sheridan’s destruction of the Shenandoah Valley.

For years, Williams was forced to work with the 8th Indiana Volunteer Infantry Regiment—most likely an all-white regiment save for “contraband” like herself. She trudged across the country, from Arkansas to Louisiana to Georgia. It is unclear when Williams’s time as contraband was up and when her freedom began. I find it even more curious that she would voluntarily
enlist in the military when she was once, essentially, enslaved by the men wearing the same uniform. It again drives home the hard place African American women were in post-Emancipation to find work. Her options were likely to continue doing the domestic labor she did for the Army, sharecropping, or relying on family or a husband for support.

While the 38th Infantry Regiment was largely composed of African American troops, the leadership was all white. Laws at the time prohibited women from joining the Regular Army until 1948 (the same year troops were integrated), so she simply inverted her name and enlisted as “William Cathey.” The misspelling of her first name was likely due to high rates of illiteracy across the nation, but especially among formerly enslaved African Americans for whom reading and writing was illegal in most states and territories. Records show her making it to New Mexico on July 20, 1867, arriving first at Fort Union before traveling to Fort Cummings in southern New Mexico, where she remained for eight months.

Cathay Williams’s time in New Mexico is commemorated with an official roadside Historic Marker in Luna County, near her former post at Fort Cummings. According to Williams, she never saw any action, saying, “No bayonet was ever put to my back.” When she wasn’t hospitalized for various ailments, she stood guard, ran drills, and scouted for Apache fighters.

She ended her Army career at Fort Bayard in Silver City, being discharged on “medical grounds” when her womanhood was discovered on October 14, 1868. She returned to Fort Union as a cook before continuing to Pueblo, Colorado. It’s unclear whether, during her last tenure working at Fort Union, she simply reverted to her original name, Cathay Williams, and pretended she had never been stationed there, or if she continued her life as William Cathay and worked as a cook.

Black History in New Mexico

One of the first things I researched when I learned of Williams’s story was what it might have been like to be a Black man or woman in New Mexico shortly after Emancipation. Calling New Mexico a free territory is a bit tricky. Indigenous communities have faced and fought subjugation and enslavement since the moment Europeans arrived in the 1500s. In addition, the first Europeans to arrive in what is now New Mexico also had an enslaved African with them.

Black history in New Mexico begins far earlier than most would assume, with “Esteban the Moor,” whose Muslim name was Mustafa Azemmouri. In 1522, the Arabic-speaking African was sold to Spanish nobleman Andrés Dorantes de Carranza, who then brought Azemmouri on the Narváez expedition to the “New World.” Only Christians were allowed to the “New World”—I can only guess whether his change of name or faith were of his own volition, but given Azemmouri’s status as property,
I think it’s safe to assume it wasn’t necessarily his choice.

The expedition was riddled with misadventures, including Azemmouri surviving a shipwreck just to be re-enslaved with his fellow survivors by members of the Coahuiltecan tribe. After escaping Spanish bondage, Azemmouri and three fellow survivors were considered the first Europeans and Africans to reach the American West. Upon arriving in Mexico City, they heard rumors of riches to the north. The few mentions of Azemmouri in Álvar
Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s book, La relación de Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (The story of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca), mention that he was a scout, sent ahead far beyond the rest of his party—and this is how he met his potential demise. Accounts vary—from Azemmouri wearing the garb of a “medicine man,” thus infuriating the Zuni Pueblo, which led to his death; or that he demanded turquoise and women and was promptly killed; or that Indigenous communities helped him fake his death so that he might finally be free. While we will never know the truth, we do know that Black people have been in New Mexico for over five hundred years.

While African American chattel slavery didn’t exist nearly on the same scale as it did in other parts of the country, New Mexico still had Slave Codes to restrict Black rights and further entrench Indigenous exploitation. Enslaved African Americans numbered less than twenty when the Slave Code of 1859 went into effect, primarily targeting runaways from neighboring Texas. The codes limited the number of free Blacks that could be in the territory at once, restricted enslaved African American movement (and ostensibly any Black person regardless of where they were coming or going), made it illegal to testify in court, and, like many of our nation’s first gun control efforts, limited our right to bear arms—except to quell Indigenous uprisings.

Life After the Buffalo Soldiers

Less than a decade after New Mexico’s Slave Code went into effect, Williams forded the Rio Grande with her fellow Buffalo Soldiers—a free woman bearing arms on behalf of her country. It appears the 38th Infantry never faced combat but participated in drills and went scouting for signs of Indigenous enemies. Williams was in and out of infirmaries for her short-lived military career—a fact that makes it even more impressive that her sex assigned at birth wasn’t discovered for almost two years of service. In her own words, she did catch smallpox early in her service while in St. Louis. However, she received her discharge from the 38th Infantry Regiment after being hospitalized, saying she “played sick, complained of pains in my side, and rheumatism in my knees. The post-surgeon found out I was a woman, and I got my discharge.”

In her chapter on Williams in An African American History of New Mexico, DeAnne Blanton wonders if racism helped her conceal her identity. Blanton writes, “The fact that five hospital visits failed to reveal that William Cathey was a woman raises questions about the quality of medical care, even by mid-nineteenth-century standards, available to the soldiers of the U.S. Army, or at least to African American soldiers.”

It’s clear that Williams left the Army disabled, but whether she was disabled in the line of duty is hard to parse out. At some point, Williams had to have several toes amputated and needed crutches—was this a potential long-term result of smallpox or, as Blanton suspects, undiagnosed diabetes? Williams’s story was shared with the world in the Denver News in 1876 after the reporter heard rumors about a woman who was a Buffalo Soldier. While serving, she stated that only her cousin and one regiment member knew she was a woman. Her final doctor in New Mexico caught Williams’s secret, but her discharge papers make no mention of this discovery. Instead, Williams was discharged for disability.

In 1891, Williams applied for a disability pension for her military service. While Williams is considered the first documented woman to enlist, she is not the first woman to file for pension after her service. People assigned female at birth (AFAB) have dressed as men to fight in wars throughout American history, and to assume doing so was solely a fight for wages or freedom could erase some more nuanced stories. Kit Heyam writes in Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender, “In many cases, we simply can’t know people’s motivations with any certainty. We know, for example, that at least four hundred AFAB people fought in the American Civil War—but most of their names are lost to us, let alone the complexities of how they understood their genders or the multiple factors that led them to enlist. But if we assume that their gender must be ‘disguise’ until proven otherwise, we’re privileging one possible interpretation over several others: bringing cisnormative assumptions to history and letting them colour the way we read it.”

I won’t lie, as a Black transmasculine person, I wish I could ask Williams what her motivations were to spend two years living as a man or have some kind of evidence that I can count her as a trans ancestor. How long would she have gone by William if she could have still “passed” as a man? How was life in New Mexico and Colorado different for her being read as a Black man compared to a Black woman in the 1800s? Was there any way for her to move through the world where she felt comfortable in her skin—or was it all to survive?

Williams was denied her military pension. The board and examining doctor declined to state anything about her years served in disguise. Instead, they decided it was unclear if her disability was a direct result of her service. It’s hard to say if racism or misogyny played a role in this decision.

Patching Together the Archive

My ancestor, Dempsey Spencer, was also denied his pension following his service with the Buffalo Soldiers. My great-great-great-great-grandpa, Dempsey, was born into enslavement in Missouri—just like Cathay Williams. My brilliant aunt, Marilyn Harbaugh-Letcher, our family genealogist, was able to track down his story through military records and the battles our family had to fight after he served his country. Dempsey ran away from his plantation to join the Union army and served this country until October 9, 1865, two months before the Thirteenth Amendment’s ratification. One hidden story my Aunt Marilyn was able to uncover was that his enslaver filed papers to request compensation for an “enlisted slave.” While he freed himself and fought for his country, this country, quite literally, did not pay him back.

After his death, his daughter Susie fought for his pension and was denied due to the scant documentation of enslaved African Americans. The government interviewed the enslaver’s children, other folks enslaved with my ancestors, and Dempsey’s fellow soldiers. Despite this bevy of oral records and history, they deemed that my ancestors’ wedding tradition of jumping the broom was insufficient to prove a “legitimate” marriage to compensate Dempsey’s family for his service. Dempsey’s name is listed on a memorial alongside other African American soldiers who fought for freedom while their metaphorical and literal siblings were in chains, only to have their bravery left unpaid.

The disrespect of Black soldiers runs deeper than being paid less than their white counterparts or nothing at all. Buffalo Soldiers and African American soldiers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did not receive the adoration or even respect they might have expected or deserved. Several of the race riots and lynchings between the Civil War and the end of the Second World War were spurred by seeing a Black man wearing an American uniform. Part of this fear came from the belief that African American men who fought for their country abroad might go home and begin fighting for their rights and communities. In 1917, U.S. Senator James Vardaman of Mississippi warned of the dangers Black veterans posed, saying that bringing Black soldiers home to the South would “inevitably lead to disaster.”

How many Black soldiers have similar stories? Denied compensation, given worse positions, facing racism from their own brother-in-arms? Scraping conflicting archives to piece this story together really highlighted for me the many gaps in all African American histories, even within the robust documentation of military operations like Westward Expansion. The intentional illiteracy of so many emancipated African Americans creates additional holes in the narrative—ones that projects like the Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, launched in 1935, sought to fill long after Williams’s and many other Buffalo Soldiers from the Indian War’s passing. What other choices are there in a country built on the backs of our labor and stolen land? The Buffalo Soldiers fought for freedoms still not guaranteed for them and their families.

We don’t know precisely when Cathay Williams passed away in Trinidad, Colorado, or from what. The years between her discharge and her pension application are murky, but she spent most or all of them in New Mexico and Colorado. She says she was married and had her husband arrested for robbing her, which led to their divorce. In her 1876 interview, she says of her choice to join the Buffalo Soldiers, “I wanted to make my own living, and not be dependent on any relations or friends.” She was hoping to buy some land and get rich. Williams didn’t seem to have many positive things to say about her time in the military, either as a forced teenage girl or while living as William. She said, “I shall never live in the States again”—although Colorado became a state a month later.

The legacy of Buffalo Soldiers like Williams is mixed and murky. Many of them were our first National Park Rangers, established incredible Black communities like New Mexico’s own Blackdom, and built military careers that led to some economic and social mobility soon after enslavement. Many Buffalo Soldiers ended up disabled or dead, denied pensions, and further disenfranchised by the country they fought for. As Bob Marley sings in “Buffalo Soldier,” Black Americans have fought since we arrived in the Americas—for our survival and for nations that don’t always love us back. The legacy of Williams and the thousands of Buffalo Soldiers that followed her forces us to ask what it truly means to be free—to be the descendants of stolen people on a stolen land, conscripted to help in the continued theft of that land and attempted erasure of Indigenous peoples.

I believe we’re at a turning point in Native American and African American relations, with a mutual understanding of historic harms like the actions of the Buffalo Soldiers or the practice of chattel slavery among the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole, and the future disenfranchisement and disenrollment of the Freedmen. The Red Nation, an Indigenous-led leftist collective, writes, “We encourage people to build upon the dreams and histories of liberation that Black and Indigenous people share, rather than compete for resources or recognition of our trauma by the state…whatever harm we may have caused one another, we encourage Black and Indigenous people to come together in this moment to fight in unity so we can bring this beast down once and for all.”

Other hidden stories of Buffalo Soldiers share similarities with those the U.S. deemed their enemy, and they built fugitive lives together, like in the autonomous Black communities dotting the Americas. I dream about more people like Williams who joined the troops, erased their past, and were able to live a new truth far from their former plantations. I hope we continue to challenge what it means to be free and understand that all oppressed people must see our interconnection to achieve true liberation.   

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Lazarus Letcher (they/them) is a PhD candidate in American Studies at the University of New Mexico. Their dissertation is titled Memorializing Queer and Trans Lives in a Time of Spectacular Erasure. They play viola for Eileen & the In-Betweens and Stages of Tectonic Blackness. Their writing can be found in Autostraddle, them, El Palacio, and the odd dry academic journal or fun zine.