After the Civil War, African American soldiers helped with U.S. efforts to secure the western territories. The story of the buffalo soldiers, as the Plains Indians called them, is one of courage, perseverance, dedication, and triumph, yet very few historians have examined their role in settling the western frontier. 1
William H. Leckie and Shirley A. Leckie capture in vivid detail the bravery of the buffalo soldiers during the Indian Wars. The Buffalo Soldiers re-examines the period from the end of Civil War to the early 1890s and re-creates the fierce battles between African American detachments from the Ninth and Tenth Regiments of the U.S. Cavalry and Native Americans. The soldiers' duties carried them to areas of present-day New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, and Colorado, where they "relocated" Comanches, Kiowas, Kiowa-Apaches, Southern Cheyennes, Arapahoes, and other Native American groups to reservations. The buffalo soldiers' duties were not limited to fighting Native Americans, however. They also apprehended Mexican bandits and revolutionaries and "border scum" such as bootleggers, cattle rustlers, horse thieves, "crooked government contractors, heartless Indian agents, and land-hungry homesteaders" (p. 18). The most notable aspect of this study is its fluid and captivating prose, particularly when the authors describe the soldiers' encounters with the revered Native American leaders Victorio, Geronimo, Satank, and Santana. 2
Their military duties gave these African American men the opportunity to "prove their manhood in a nation that, by and large, but particularly in the South, denigrated their worth as human beings" (p. 10). Despite having inadequate artillery, ...