Saints, Cowboys, And Buffalo Soldiers
"General
Orders No. 1, issued in February 1881, abolished all military districts in the
Department of Texas. (Colonel Benjamin F)
Grierson took note of the service of the black soldiers from 1878-1880 of the
Tenth, Twenty-Fourth, and Twenty-Fifth (Cavalry Regiments) from his
headquarters at Fort Concho in the District of the Pecos. They had constructed and maintained three
hundred miles of telegraph lines, guarded over one thousand miles of wagon
roads, and marched 135,710 miles. They
had conducted the successful campaign against Victorio and the Mimbres
Apaches. They had made the district so
safe that settlers flocked to western Texas."-- Debra J Scheffler, The Buffalo
Soldiers:Their Epic Story and Major Campaigns, 2015
Bartholomew J De Witt, whose beloved wife
Carolina Angela Garza died in 1866, paid $320 for 320 acres of land in the arid
quarter of Texas west of the 100th meridian and south of the 32nd
parallel around the time a nearby military installation received its third and
final name in 1868...
 |
| Angela Garza De Witt and her patron saint, Angela de Merici, overlook the Concho River in John Noelke's 2005 sculpture, Las dos Angelas, located behind the visitor's center in downtown San Angelo |
Fort Concho (after brief incarnations as Camp
Hatch and Camp Kelly) sat near the junction of the Middle and North Concho
rivers at a site meant to overcome a lack of water for troops and horses-- the major deficiency of Fort Chadbourne which
had been established in 1852 in what later became Coke County to protect stage
coach routes and the few European descent settlers in the harsh and dry region...
 |
| Wagon train settlers headed west pause for a respite at Fort Concho in this undated photograph from the late 19th Century |
The renamed military outpost would play a key
role in settling the American Southwest.
Its soldiers were charged with protecting settlers and keeping the route
to El Paso del Norte open at the same time they mapped the four hundred miles
of desert separating the Army garrisons of Fort Concho and Fort Bliss, working
in conjunction with men assigned to even more remote and isolated locations
such as Fort Stockton and Fort Davis...
Most of this grueling work fell to a group of
men called Buffalo Soldiers..
 |
| Stylle Read included this realistic depiction of a Fort Concho soldier in the harsh and unforgiving West Texas desert in a 2012 mural devoted to the military heritage of San Angelo |
Where there are soldiers, there are goods not
readily available in military commisaries and Bart De Witt established a
trading post in an area referred to as “Over The River” to meet the needs of
troops and settlers alike. The collection
of shops and saloons that sprang up soon took the name San Angela, either in
honor of De Witt’s wife, her patron saint (Angela de Merici), or a relative of
the family who was a nun in San Antonio...
Santa Angela became the town of San Angelo,
thanks to a mishap with the Post Office which resulted in a bureaucratic sex
change for a town known for gamblers, prostitutes, and saloons. Among the rascals who added to the
misdeeds committed in the dusty desert settlement were the card sharps Carlotta
J Thompkins aka Lottie Deno aka Mystic Maude (and the prototype for Miss Kitty
on the Gunsmoke television series) and
John Henry “Doc” Holliday, a dentist best remembered today for a 30 second
gunfight at the O K Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. This outlaw past and reputation
as a dangerous frontier city eventually worked its way into popular American
music as “San Angelo”, a gunslinger ballad by Marty Robbins, who told a similar
story about an outlaw and his lover in El Paso...
 |
| Born into Kentucky wealth, Lottie Deno chose the life of gambler in San Angelo and other western frontier towns. She is said to be the inspiration for Gunsmoke's Miss Kitty |
But, long before that, in 1866, following the
Civil War, Congress found itself impressed by the bravery of the 180,000 or so
black soldiers who’d seen service in the Union Army and decided to form cavalry
and infantry regiments composed of African-Americans. Several regiments were
consolidated after their creation and, by 1869, these men were assigned to one
of four regiments: the Ninth United States Cavalry, the Tenth United States
Cavalry, the Twenty-Fourth United States Infantry, and the Twenty-Fifth United
States Infantry. They were relatively
well paid for the times-- Buffalo Soldiers enlisted for five years with a
starting salary of $13 per month...
Despite the dangerous duties assigned these men,
their ability to lead themselves and plan complex military operations was
questioned. White officers commanded
them with few exceptions, the most notable of these being Henry O Flipper, who,
in 1873, became the first black man to receive a commission from West Point...
 |
| Henry O Flipper, circa 1900. Despite his mistreatment by the military, Flipper went on to a long and successful career as an author, engineer, and political advisor |
[Flipper was eventually forced out of the Army
in what now appears to have been a racially motivated court martial involving
the disappearance of post funds entrusted to his care. Acquitted of charges of embezzlement, he was
nevertheless found guilty of “conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman”
and dismissed from the service in June 1882.]
Sadly enough, a number of white officers,
including George Armstrong Custer of Little Bighorn infamy, refused to command black
soldiers. In Custer’s case, he believed
them inclined to cowardice and consequently considered it below his dignity to
ride alongside such men. His distaste
for black soldiers was so great that he turned down command of the Tenth
Cavalry, a Colonel’s position, and instead accepted a Lieutenant Colonel’s
duties with the Seventh Cavalry...
Among those who disagreed with Custer’s
assessment of African-American courage and fighting skills were Native American
tribes of the Desert Southwest and the Great Plains who first referred to the
black infantry and cavalry troops as Buffalo Soldiers. It was a term bestowed with respect. Disagreement exists as to whether the
Cheyenne or the Comanche first used the term.
Several theories have also been advanced to explain the origin of the
Buffalo Soldier nickname: the curly black hair of the soldiers, their ferocity
and bravery in battle, the buffalo hide coats they wore in the winter...
 |
| 10th Cavalry soldiers on the parade grounds of Fort Davis |
Regardless of how they got their name, black Buffalo
Soldiers made the Great Plains safe for white settlers at the expense of the
red man in quick order, building roads and telegraph lines and escorting mail
between skirmishes with the native settlers.
The focus of their duties then shifted southwest to the dry country of
West Texas. In April 1875, regimental
headquarters for the Tenth Cavalry were transferred to Fort Concho (which
simultaneously also became home base for the Ninth Cavalry) where its soldiers continued the work they’d
begun on the Kansas plains at Fort Leavenworth...
Soldiers assigned to Fort Concho were primarily
responsible for patrolling the previously mentioned southwestern quarter of
Texas, a land of desert grasslands dotted with xeric shrubs as well as large
stretches of barren country almost entirely lacking in vegetation. Readers who are familiar with the western
half of Texas would appreciate the difficulty of their duties even if the hard
country of the Concho Valley and Trans-Pecos had been the only area of
responsibility for these men. But they
also found themselves traveling northward to the equally harsh regions of the
Llano Estacado and Panhandle to fight Comanches or map the sparsely populated
landscapes...
One of the greatest miltary challenges the
Tenth Cavalry faced came in 1880 when it became part of the campaign against
the Apache chieftain Victorio and his band.
Led by Colonel Benjamin Grierson, who had commanded the regiment since
its founding in 1866, the Buffalo Soldiers of the Tenth Cavalry marched ten
thousand miles of desolate country to successfully engage Victorio’s men at
Tinaja de las Palmas and Rattlesnake Springs...
 |
| Benjamin Grierson commanded the 10th Cavalry from its beginnings in 1866 until his retirement from the Army in 1890, refusing numerous offers of transfer to less grueling assignments |
[Eventually killed in battle in Mexico, Victorio
was, like Cochise, a son-in-law to Mangas Colorado whose torture and murder by
American soldiers in January 1863 while under a flag of truce inflamed the
Apache. Victorio’s sister Lozen was also highly regarded for her courage in battle,
her skill as a horsewoman, and what seems to have been a kind of prophetic
ability and clairvoyance allowing her to see things at a distance and forecast
the outcome of events. After her
brother’s death, Lozen allied herself with Geronimo and continued to battle for
her people until her own death from tuberculosis in 1890.]
Grierson also wore the hat of commander of the
Military District of the Pecos from 1878 to 1881. When he relinquished those duties, he noted
“a settled feeling of security, heretofore unknown, prevails throughout Western
Texas.” A year later, in 1882, the
regimental headquarters of the Tenth Cavalry was transferred deeper into the
desert to Fort Davis in Texas across the Pecos to contend with the remaining
threats posed to settlement...
 |
| Lozen, sister of Victorio and a fierce warrior in her own right, was said to possess supernatural powers of prophecy and clairvoyance |
The tenor of the times was such that Grierson, originally
a music teacher who lacked West Point credentials but who’d overcome a personal
fear of horses to prove his mettle during the Civil War, was viewed by his
peers with a certain disdain not only for his unwavering support of the black
soldiers he commanded (from 1866 until 1890) but also for his strong respect
for the Native Peoples he fought...
While the role of the Buffalo Soldier in settling the frontier is slowly
becoming more widely known, the fact that about one in four post Civil War
Texas cowboys was a black man (with Mexican cattle hands being at least as
numerous) still eludes most of us.
British born film documentary producer John Ferguson suspects the lack
of cowboys of color during in the movies and television shows from the heyday
of Hollywood westerns lies at the root of our general ignorance about the role
minorities played in taming the frontier...
 |
| Mario Van Peebles in Posse |
One notable example of the lack of color in
Hollywood is John Ford’s The Searchers,
a 1956 film starring John Wayne as a Civil War veteran whose niece has been
abducted by Indian. The Alan Le May
novel on which Ford based his film was inspired largely by the story of Brit
Johnson, a black cowboy whose wife and children were taken prisoner by the
Comanche in 1865...
Despite this under-representation of the black
role in settling the American West, the movie industry didn’t totally ignore
the subject. A sampling of these films:
in the 1920s, Bill Pickett, an African-American cowboy credited with inventing
the “bull-dogging” rodeo event starred in a film produced by the Norman Film
Manufacturing of Jacksonville, Florida.
Herbert Jeffrey, who later toured with Duke Ellington, played the lead
in 1939’s Harlem Rides The Range. In
1972, Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte teamed up for Buck and The Preacher as a wagon-master and con man leading freed
slaves west. A quest for vengeance
drives 1993’s Posse with Mario Van
Peebles...
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| Despite the fact that the last soldiers marched away from Fort Concho in June 1889, it remains among the best preserved frontier outposts in the nation. Local merchants and historical re-enactors have staged an annual "Christmas at Old Fort Concho" event since the 1980s to recall San Angelo's beginnings as a rough and tumble Old West haven for outlaws |
Black cowboys, especially those born into
slavery, often found a better life on the range than they could have elsewhere
in a state that had allied itself with the Confederacy. The reason for this was fairly simple. Survival of men working together in the hard
land of the American West depended on trust.
A man had to rely, like a soldier in combat, on the man next to
him. Too much prejudice could easily
prove fatal. As cattle driver Charles
Goodnight said of his friend Bose Ikard, born into slavery in Noxubee County,
Mississippi, “(I) trusted him farther than any living man. He was my detective, banker, and everything
else in Colorado, New Mexico, and the wild country I was in”...
Historian Mike Searles has noted the range
offered another form of equality for former slaves-- there were few bosses to
tell him what to do. A black cowboy
often had the unenviable task of being the one to break unridden horses. But you might also find him as the camp cook
or the man whose job it was to sing softly and keep restless herds calm when
there was a hint of a desert thunderstorm on the horizon...
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CREDITS
Note: All
photographs and research for this essay were located through Google Images or
Wikipedia and other readily available public materials, without authoritative
source or ownership information except as noted: photographs of Las dos Angelas, Christmas at Old Fort Concho, and Stylle Read mural by Louis R Nugent; Still of Mario Van Peebles in Posse (1993) from http://ia.media-imdb.com/; Lottie Deno from http://www.legendsofamerica.com/; 10th
Cavalry at Fort Davis from http://tpwd.texas.gov/state-parks/programs/buffalo-soldiers/;
wagon train at Fort Concho from http://www.texasbeyondhistory.net/forts/images/travellors.html;
origin of Buffalo Soldier nickname and racial prejudice against black soldiers
from http://www.buffalosoldiers-amwest.org/history.htm; Custer comments from http://www.deseretnews.com/article/496071/BUFFALO-SOLDIERS-GOT-THE-LAST-LAUGH-ON-CUSTER.html?pg=all;
chronology of Fort Concho: http://www.fortconcho.com/forms/A%20Fort%20Concho%20Chronology.pdf;
http://www.vq.com/buffalo-soldiers/; http://texasalmanac.com/topics/history/frontier-forts-texas;
Grierson’s comments upon relinquishing his command from Fort Concho: A
History and a Guide, James T Matthews,
Texas State Historical Association Press, 2013; black cowboys from http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/15/world/black-cowboys/;
Black Cowboys, Teresa Paloma Acosta,
Handbook of Texas Online; Mike Searles observations from http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21768669;
black western films from http://www.separatecinema.com/exhibits_harlem.html
