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 100^th meridian and south of the 32^nd 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...



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/; 10^th 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