There they were: two mounted men wearing buffalo-hide overcoats. Pvt. John Randall had been ordered to "accompany and protect" those two civilians who were drawing farther and farther from him with each wheeze of his mount. What a joke. The hunters each carried a .50-calibre buffalo rifle to Randall's Civil War musket, and each rode a horse at least ten years younger than Randall's lame companion.
Pvt. Randall did not much mind the distance between himself and his charges, however. It was only 1867, but the blanket of buffalo that had for centuries covered the plains was already beginning to wear thin. From the smell of them, Randall's hunters had done their share of fraying that blanket.
Besides, how much danger could there be? They were within pistol shot of the Kansas-Pacific construction camp where the remainder of Co. G was stationed. And, too, the three would not be out that long, just until the hunters got some meat for the construction crew.
Then Pvt. Randall saw the dust. It rolled up out of the west and was followed by the sound of hooves. The hunters reined in, turned and beat their mounts back toward Randall. The trooper mounted his horse and unbooted his musket. He heard screams, whistles, and rifle shots. He saw 70 Indians sweep down on the hunters. One horse cartwheeled, then another. A .50-calibre boom defied the wave of dust and feathers--but only briefly--then the wave rolled on toward John Randall, private, Co. G, 10th U.S. Cavalry.
Army units come (and go) in all shapes, sizes, and missions. Some have become quite famous. Others merely exist in obscurity. The fame of certain units comes from a variety of sources. Some formations have been quite obviously ethnic: the Indians of the 45th Thunderbird Division, or the "Go for Broke" Nisei of World War II.
Others became famous for their leaders: the Sheridans, the Longstreets, the Custers or the McAuliffes. Still others trace their reputation or notoriety to a single engagement, be it a Bastogne or a Little Big Horn. Whatever provides the impetus to greatness or glory, it has to begin somewhere, and the 10th Regiment of U.S. Cavalry in western Kansas combined all the characteristics to create one of the most effective military organizations in American history.
Black soldiers have served in every war fought by the United States. It was not until the War for Southern Independence, however, that they were organized into units and fought on a large scale. After the Emancipation Proclamation of 1 January, 1863, nearly 180,000 black men were recruited into the federal army.
They fought from Ft. Wagner, S.C. to Baxter Springs, Kan. They suffered at Cold Harbor. They were massacred by the hundreds in "the crater" at Petersburg, at Ft. Pillow in Tennessee, and at Flat Rock Ford in Indian Territory. In all 33,380 men of color died to conquer the South.
After the Civil War's end, it did not take long to see the need for blacks as permanent members of the frontier military establishment. Beginning in 1862, with "the great Sioux uprising," one Indian war after another festered, flared, and forced ranchers, settlers, farmers, and even military back into the land of the sun's rising from whence the Indians had perceived their coming.
The 'peacetime' Army had an authorized strength of 54,641 officers and men. The actual strength of the Army was only 38,540. Most of that was scattered throughout the South as an army of occupation. The call went out to form new regiments to fight the Indians. Few Americans responded. Most considered four years of internecine warfare enough. So once again Congress turned to the black man.
From his headquarters in St. Louis, Mo., Lt. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman issued General Order Number Six on 9 August, 1866:
Commanders of military departments within this division in which colored troops are serving will proceed at once to enlist men for two regiments of colored regulars, under the Act of Congress approved July 28, 1866, entitled "An Act to Increase and Fix the Military Peace Establishment of the United States"; one of cavalry, to be entitled the Tenth Regiment, United States Cavalry, and one of infantry to be entitled the Thirty-eighth Regiment, United States Infantry . . . .
The actual formation of the 10th Cavalry was slow going from the beginning for several reasons. First, it was difficult to find officers willing to serve with black units. Both George A. Custer and Frederic Benteen turned down commissions with a black regiment. Gen. Eugene Asa Carr maintained that "Negroes simply would not make good soldiers" and took a lower rank to serve with a white regiment. Eventually, Col. Benjamin Grierson accepted command of the 10th.
This Grierson, a small-town music teacher from Illinois, who disliked horses, was the same one Gen. Grant had picked in April, 1863 to lead three regiments of cavalry through Mississippi in a diversionary raid. The 600-mile, 16-day raid facilitated Grant's siege of Vicksburg and led the general to call the raid "the most brilliant expedition of the war."
Col. Grierson reserved the right to accept only 'superior men' for service in his regiment--the second reason that regimental organization was delayed. To the ex-slave an offer of $13 a month, three meals a day, clothes, a horse, and a place to live seemed a great opportunity, especially compared to his situation in America at that time in history.
Many were eager to enlist, but Col. Grierson did not see his mission as that of an agent for hope and change, rather as an officer trying to build an efficient organization. His men had to be able to endure Arizona's heat and Montana's cold, the plains of Kansas and the mountains of Colorado. They had to be able to march beyond the point of no return, fight a battle, and return victorious. He wanted his men to be superior to the "best light cavalry in the world" because his support and supplies were highly inferior.
That was the third factor which delayed the 10th, even after officers and enlisted men had been recruited. The horses, horse furniture, weapons, field equipment, uniforms, even the food which went to the 10th, were those animals, items, and equipment which had been rejected by the other frontier regiments.
Many of the horses died in transit to the 10th. Horse furniture and field equipment frequently came apart under inspection. And the rations were not just Army-rotten, but maggot-ridden cases of filth. Consequently, it was not until August, 1867, that the 10th Cavalry hobbled out into western Kansas to face the enemy.
The enemy was the Dog Soldier band of Southern Cheyenne. Under the leadership of Tall Bull, Bull Bear, White Horse, and Gray Beard, and in alliance with various bands of Sioux and Arapaho, the Dog Soldiers had since 1865 succeeded quite well in interdicting the movement of settlers, soldiers, and supplies west along both the Platte and the Powder River roads. Fighting in a style unique to the Plains of North America, they had cost the U.S. government millions of dollars, the lives of hundreds of men, women, and children, and the reputations of several general and staff officers.
So great was their reputation by this time that once (Julesburg, 1865) an American unit refused to fire on them for fear of retaliation, and twice (at Ft. Laramie and on the Powder River) units mutinied rather than march against them.
It was not the hit-and-run tactics of guerrilla warfare that the Army found difficult to counteract--it had faced and eventually beaten scores of tribes employing those same tactics from Florida to the Mississippi River. Nor was it the particular brand of atrocities perpetrated on the plains that made the Indians there so difficult to neutralize.
The Army had faced much worse, and not necessarily at the hands of Indians. What made fighting Plains Indians in general and the Dog Soldiers of Kansas in particular so unnerving was their obvious sense of personal invincibility.
On the Plains, to be a man was to be a warrior. To be a warrior was to have 'power' or 'medicine.' Medicine power was supernatural in its origin and sought after by every male Indian beginning on or about his 12th year. At that time a boy would spend four days and nights alone with no food or water 'seeking a vision.' If a vision came, usually of an animal or natural event, it was interpreted to be of divine origin and a sign that the seeker had been accepted and approved by a deity as a man.
The man would usually relate his vision to a group of village elders or medicine men. They would interpret the vision, prescribe certain taboos, and specify the contents of the man's medicine bundle--the physical memorial of the spiritual event. If the vision was true, if the interpretation correct, if the taboos faithfully kept, the man was guaranteed invincibility in battle.
A Cheyenne boy named Bat had sought and found a vision on an island in a lake in Montana. He saw a long multicolored serpent like none on earth. A single horn grew from the top of its head. The medicine man, Ice, made a trailing warbonnet for Bat, put a single buffalo horn on the headdress, changed the boy's name to Roman Nose (the closest English approximation to the Cheyenne reference to the great horn on the headdress), and forbade him ever to eat anything touched by the white man's metal.
Roman Nose was told that if he followed this taboo, and wore the medicine-bundle warbonnet, bullets would not harm him. Twice Roman Nose proved the truth of his vision and his medicine: once at the Platte Bridge Fight in 1865 when he single-handedly emptied the rifles of an Army wagon-train escort and thereby brought about its annihilation and again, a few months later, on the Powder River when he rode alone four times in front of 2,000 soldiers who, in four volleys, succeeded only in killing his horse.
To the warriors of the Kansas Plains this type of reckless, almost suicidal, valor was the norm. This valor coupled with ponies that could outrun and outlast the best horseflesh the Army could put in the field and, in the still relatively plentiful herds of buffalo, a commissary of food, supplies, and materiel which had not yet been neutralized, well earned for them Benteen's plaudit as ". . . the best fighters the sun ever shined on."
But, as is often the case in the affairs of war, among the ingredients of victory are also those of defeat. Individual valor was held up as the norm, coordinated group tactics were ignored. The reckless deed that gained personal success was praised and rewarded. Tribal victories were mentioned but in passing.
Thus it was that warriors were gaudily turned out in paint and feathers. Each feather represented a deed or coup: some for striking an enemy in battle, others for slaying an enemy, another for taking a scalp, still another for suffering a wound while counting a coup.
Men an horses were also painted for the same purpose. This stripe on the pony's foreleg meant a coup counted. That hoof print mark on the flank meant an enemy horse captured. A blood-red hand print on the animal meant an enemy killed in hand-to-hand combat, as did a hand print on the warrior's war shirt, as did a hand print over a warrior's mouth--as did a face painted black.
It is likely that the first black man any of the Plains tribes saw was York, the slave who accompanied the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Of him it was said:
The enemy was the Dog Soldier band of Southern Cheyenne. Under the leadership of Tall Bull, Bull Bear, White Horse, and Gray Beard, and in alliance with various bands of Sioux and Arapaho, the Dog Soldiers had since 1865 succeeded quite well in interdicting the movement of settlers, soldiers, and supplies west along both the Platte and the Powder River roads. Fighting in a style unique to the Plains of North America, they had cost the U.S. government millions of dollars, the lives of hundreds of men, women, and children, and the reputations of several general and staff officers.
So great was their reputation by this time that once (Julesburg, 1865) an American unit refused to fire on them for fear of retaliation, and twice (at Ft. Laramie and on the Powder River) units mutinied rather than march against them.
It was not the hit-and-run tactics of guerrilla warfare that the Army found difficult to counteract--it had faced and eventually beaten scores of tribes employing those same tactics from Florida to the Mississippi River. Nor was it the particular brand of atrocities perpetrated on the plains that made the Indians there so difficult to neutralize.
The Army had faced much worse, and not necessarily at the hands of Indians. What made fighting Plains Indians in general and the Dog Soldiers of Kansas in particular so unnerving was their obvious sense of personal invincibility.
On the Plains, to be a man was to be a warrior. To be a warrior was to have 'power' or 'medicine.' Medicine power was supernatural in its origin and sought after by every male Indian beginning on or about his 12th year. At that time a boy would spend four days and nights alone with no food or water 'seeking a vision.' If a vision came, usually of an animal or natural event, it was interpreted to be of divine origin and a sign that the seeker had been accepted and approved by a deity as a man.
The man would usually relate his vision to a group of village elders or medicine men. They would interpret the vision, prescribe certain taboos, and specify the contents of the man's medicine bundle--the physical memorial of the spiritual event. If the vision was true, if the interpretation correct, if the taboos faithfully kept, the man was guaranteed invincibility in battle.
A Cheyenne boy named Bat had sought and found a vision on an island in a lake in Montana. He saw a long multicolored serpent like none on earth. A single horn grew from the top of its head. The medicine man, Ice, made a trailing warbonnet for Bat, put a single buffalo horn on the headdress, changed the boy's name to Roman Nose (the closest English approximation to the Cheyenne reference to the great horn on the headdress), and forbade him ever to eat anything touched by the white man's metal.
Roman Nose was told that if he followed this taboo, and wore the medicine-bundle warbonnet, bullets would not harm him. Twice Roman Nose proved the truth of his vision and his medicine: once at the Platte Bridge Fight in 1865 when he single-handedly emptied the rifles of an Army wagon-train escort and thereby brought about its annihilation and again, a few months later, on the Powder River when he rode alone four times in front of 2,000 soldiers who, in four volleys, succeeded only in killing his horse.
To the warriors of the Kansas Plains this type of reckless, almost suicidal, valor was the norm. This valor coupled with ponies that could outrun and outlast the best horseflesh the Army could put in the field and, in the still relatively plentiful herds of buffalo, a commissary of food, supplies, and materiel which had not yet been neutralized, well earned for them Benteen's plaudit as ". . . the best fighters the sun ever shined on."
But, as is often the case in the affairs of war, among the ingredients of victory are also those of defeat. Individual valor was held up as the norm, coordinated group tactics were ignored. The reckless deed that gained personal success was praised and rewarded. Tribal victories were mentioned but in passing.
Thus it was that warriors were gaudily turned out in paint and feathers. Each feather represented a deed or coup: some for striking an enemy in battle, others for slaying an enemy, another for taking a scalp, still another for suffering a wound while counting a coup.
Men an horses were also painted for the same purpose. This stripe on the pony's foreleg meant a coup counted. That hoof print mark on the flank meant an enemy horse captured. A blood-red hand print on the animal meant an enemy killed in hand-to-hand combat, as did a hand print on the warrior's war shirt, as did a hand print over a warrior's mouth--as did a face painted black.
It is likely that the first black man any of the Plains tribes saw was York, the slave who accompanied the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Of him it was said:
One of the strange men was black. He had painted himself in charcoal, my people thought. In those days, it was the custom for warriors, when returning home from battle, to prepare themselves before reaching camp. Those who had been brave and fearless, the victorious ones in battle, painted themselves in charcoal. So the black man, they thought, had been the bravest of his party.
It is just as likely that the first black man any band of Cheyenne Dog Soldiers ever saw was the one fumbling with a musket while sitting alone on a very old, very lame horse.
It is doubtful that John Randall had any idea what was coming at him across the Kansas Plains. He knew they were Indians, probably Cheyenne, but had no conception of the cultural baggage they were dragging along with them through the dust. Nor was Pvt. Randall aware that his situation (odds of 70 to 1) was really not that much worse than that of the troopers who stood off many times that number of Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho at the Wagon Box Fight and the Hayfield Fight a couple of years before.
It is certain Randall had never heard of York. His reaction then, in light of all he did know of the situation, was both logical in selection and expeditious in execution. He turned his mount and beat it for home.
He did not get far. A Cheyenne bullet put the trooper's horse out of its misery. Pvt. Randall rolled free, but lost his musket and his cap. He hit the ground on a dead run. Bullets spattered the dust around him. Fortunately for Randall, the Indians had even less concern for target practice than the Army. The soldier reached the rail line only seconds before the Indians reached him. The trooper threw himself flat and half-scrambled, half-clawed his way into a small washout under a section of track. He pulled his pistol and blasted into the maelstrom that thundered over him.
The Indians drew off. It was the classic situation: a cornered, dangerous enemy who could be killed but could quite easily take one or more of the war party with him. So the Dog Soldiers did the expected. One at a time they charged down on Randall. If he saw them, he fired. If not, they blind-sided him with their eight-foot lances.
It is not known how many Dog Soldiers rushed Pvt. Randall. It is known that 11 of them counted coup on him before they, in turn, were ambushed by a reaction force from Co. G.
The Dog Soldiers retreated, rallied for a counterattack, and then retreated again, leaving 13 of their number dead on the field. The detachment, commanded by Sgt. Ed David, eventually located Pvt. Randall and pulled him from under the railroad track. The trooper was crimson with blood from 11 lance wounds. In spite of the seriousness of his wounds, in spite of the length of time it took for him to get medical attention, and in spite of the medical treatment he received, Randall did not die. The Dog Soldiers knew this, or knew rather that they had failed to kill him--the first 'black white man' they had ever seen.
Traditionally, after a raid, the entire village would turn out to see the warriors return and hear of their exploits. The party that ambushed Pvt. Randall and his hunters returned to a village located between the Smoky Hill and Republican rivers in northwest Kansas. Once there, they told the story that spread south to the Apache, Arapaho, and Comanche of the black white man who had fought like a cornered buffalo; who like a buffalo had suffered wound after wound, yet had not died; and who like a buffalo had a thick and shaggy mane of hair.
John Randall would never meet the Dog Soldiers again. They never knew what became of him. But what happened that day, at least in the minds of the Cheyenne, marked the 10th Cavalry as something special--as a new thing on the very old Plains. On that day the 10th Cavalry became 'the Buffalo Soldiers'--the black-faced fighters who could not be beaten.
From Kansas, the 10th moved to West Texas and from there to New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado. The Buffalo Soldiers marched north through the Dakotas and south into Mexico. They fought the Mescalero, the Lipan, and the Chiricahua Apache, the Kickapoo, the Sioux, the Comanche, the Cheyenne, and the Kiowa. The killed, captured, or otherwise had a hand in neutralizing Victorio, Nana, Mangus Coloradas, and Geronimo of the Apache, and Lone Wolf, Kicking Bird, Satanta, Satank, and Big Tree of the Plains tribes.
Through 23 years of service in the Indian wars, from 1867 to 1890, the Buffalo Soldiers, just as the Indians had feared, were never beaten.
As a result of their service in the Indian wars, officers vied for an appointment to the 10th. Indeed, John J. Pershing thought so highly of the Buffalo Soldiers from his time with them that he never ceased to trumpet their virtues. For this he was dubbed 'Black Jack' after he became commandant of West Point.
During the Spanish-American War, the Buffalo Soldiers fought at Las Guasimas and rescued Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders at San Juan hill. This latter action prompted TR to comment, "I wish no better men beside me in battle than these colored troops showed themselves to be."
The 10th Cavalry served on the Mexican border in World War I and in North Africa in World War II. It was there, however, that they ceased to be a cavalry regiment and became part of the Second Armored Division.
Before and after Pvt. Randall's fight with the Dog Soldiers, black troopers in general and the 10th in particular were called all manner of names--"Moacs," "Brunettes," "Niggers," and "Africans." What the civilians thought did not matter. The 10th's enemies respected them. In recognition of that respect, the buffalo was adopted as part of the distinctive unit insignia of the 10th Cavalry.
But the tradition of victory like the name and the insignia had to begin somewhere. In this case, it had its origin in a minor action by a lone trooper who had no choice but to fight like a cornered buffalo.
