THE TWENTY-FOURTH INFANTRY IN SALT LAKE CITY

Another infantryman, Parker Buford, served thirty years in the Twenty-fourth. He was born in Giles County, Tennessee, January 30, 1842. Buford's son, James J. Buford, also served in the unit. In 1898 the Buford family lived on the perimeter of Fort Douglas at 333 South 13th Street. A number of other black families lived in the general area. Discharged from the army in 1898, the elder Buford continued to live in Salt Lake City until his death in 1911. He is buried in the Fort Douglas cemetery... According to newspaper reports, the new residents of Fort Douglas were pleased with their assignment and "gratified at having been transferred from Texas to the promised land." Members of the unit apparently wanted the people of Salt Lake City to have a good impression of them, for as one member of the regiment stated: "I do not say this from conceit, but you will find our regiment better behaved and disciplined than most of the white soldiers. It is not an easy matter to get 600 men together without there are one or two unruly fellows among them."

The arrival of the Twenty-fourth was not without its impact upon the city's black community. When the soldiers arrived on the Union Pacific, it was reported that "almost every colored resident in the city met them at the station." There would be greater contact between the fort and the black citizens of the city in the months to come... There was [also] considerable talk about its band that over a three-year period would entertain thousands of Utah's citizens, "its crack drilling," and the ability of many of its members in athletics, both track and baseball... Almost nineteen months after the regiment's arrival in Utah the routine of post life at Fort Douglas was interrupted by speculation that should it become necessary to send troops to Cuba, "the four "colored regiments" would be the first to depart for the war zone. The rumor was accurate... Interest in the movement of the troops was intense throughout the city... The Twenty-fourth [left] on April 20, [1898] and the newspapers estimated that "15,000 to 20,000 people were on and about the [train] depot ground. Included in that throng were wives, children, and girl friends who "sat for hours under the trees with their soldier lords and sires." Ladies, reported the Salt Lake Tribune who did not like to ride on streetcars with black soldiers were...shaking hands with these same soldiers... Generally speaking, suspicion and uncertainty [between soldiers and civilians] gave way to confidence and resolution, stereotypes to a tenuous familiarity... Black soldiers...became improbable ambassadors...in the "Great Basin Kingdom."
Source: Michael J. Clark, "Improbable Ambassadors: Black Soldiers at Fort Douglas, 1896-99," Utah Historical Quarterly 46:3 (Summer 1978):282-301.

AN EX-SOLDIER COMMUNITY ON THE TEXAS FRONTIER
The following is a brief description of the mostly ex-soldier African American community around Fort Griffin, West Texas in the 1870s.
Between the predominantly white military and civilian societies, African Americans formed an almost unnoticed subculture... Yet they were there, and in significant numbers. They did not comprise a single, separate community, but instead represented a subordinate class beside each body of Anglos. The buffalo soldiers, the most visible group, were only temporary residents. They closed ranks within their respective companies, of course, and fraternized with black civilians. A number of them remained in the Clear Fork country after their enlistments expired. Former buffalo soldiers and others, in fact, established a small enclave among their white neighbors at the base of Government Hill. Other black persons resided at the post or were scattered throughout the countryside. Their lack of a community focus obscured the fact that in 1870 nearly a hundred African Americans lived in the Clear Fork country--and this was before the first buffalo soldier had arrived.

The occupations of African Americans varied. Officers' families at Fort Griffin employed black and mulatto women exclusively as domestic servants. Some worked for single officers, too, but more often unmarried men of rank hired grooms. This domestic class, along with their children, were normally listed as members of their employers' households. The census taker also noted that black men typically listed "laborer" as their occupation. They performed tasks such as hauling wood, helping contractors, and working for anyone who would pay them wages. A few developed specialties. John Carter became a butcher and Milton Sutton a carpenter, and young Tennessean James Romey founded a school for black children. Others, such as Floyd King and Alfred Smaldin, raised stock and planted gardens in the countryside, and about a dozen worked for cow hunters. Like most Anglo herder folk, the rural blacks hailed from the South exclusively.

As elsewhere in Texas, African Americans endured the prejudice and humiliation of second-class citizenship. Colonel Buell, who was sensitive to racial animosities, was apprehensive about committing his black troopers to patrol for white outlaws. He had feared that some of them would be killed, "for a Texas cattle or horse thief hates a colored soldier." The scarce and scattered numbers of African Americans, however, did not invite the extreme forms of protest that carpetbaggers, scalawags, and soldiers in the interior encouraged. Anglo settlers nevertheless remained on guard in the event that black soldiers and civilians should unite and become unruly. An occasional crime reinforced their suspicions, as in 1873, when a buffalo soldier was apprehended for stealing sixty-five dollars from T.E. Jackson's store. Another man in the same unit accosted an officer who was escorting two women from a church service; after striking him on the head with a stone, the assailant fled into a patch of high weeds and fired several errant shots at them. Once black soldiers became civilians, however, their aggressions were few...
Source: Ty Cashion, A Texas Frontier--The Clear Fork Country and Fort Griffin, 1849-1887, (Norman, 1996), pp. 141-144.

BLACK TROOPS AND WHITE STRIKERS IN IDAHO
After the Wounded Knee episode in 1890, African American soldiers in the West assumed a new responsibility in the growing labor struggles of the region. Between 1892 and 1900 elements of various black regiments confronted striking miners in northern Idaho (twice), elements of Coxey's Army in Montana, and striking railroad workers in Colorado. When 1,000 miners in the Coeur D'Alene silver mining district rioted and shut down the mines in northern Idaho in April, 1899, black and white soldiers were called out to restore order to Idaho in April, 1899. Idaho Governor Frank Steunenberg declared "an insurrection in Shoshone County" and called upon the soldiers to assist law enforcement officials in a "sweep" of suspect labor sympathizers. The following vignette, taken for a contemporary account of one sweep in Burke, Idaho, describes the role of the black soldiers.
On Saturday, April 29, nearly one thousand [striking] miners from Canyon Creek, masked and armed with rifles and revolvers, stole a Northern Pacific mail-train at Burke. They placed on board three thousands pounds of dynamite and...descended on Wardner. The employees of the mine and mill had been warned of the attack and fled in time to escape the mob. The men then [planted the dynamite at the mill]. There were six explosions which could be heard twenty miles away. The wreck of the mill and all it contained was complete. Three hours after reaching Wardner the rioters returned to Burke on their stolen train...

As nearly all of the Idaho militia is in the Philippines, Governor Steunenberg called for Federal aid. General Merriam was ordered [by President McKinley] to proceed to Wardner with a force of about 650 regulars... At Burke, the headquarters of the dynamite conspirators, every man in the town was captured. Two companies of soldiers, dispatched on a special train to that point, did the work with uncommon thoroughness. The town stretches out for about a mile at the bottom of a steep canyon. Guards were stationed on the walls of the gorge to prevent the escape of fugitives, and then the soldiers made a house-to-house search. At the shafts other soldiers were detailed to seize the miners as they came off shift. In the business portion of the single long street, merchants and clerks were taken from their shops. Cooks and waiters were captured in the kitchens, and guests as they sat at table. The postmaster, the superintendent of the public schools, doctors and lawyers, were all alike "rounded up"--a grand total of two hundred and forty-three persons. Oft this number thirty succeeded in proving their innocence forthwith, and were released. The others were herded into a trail of box-cars, and so conveyed to Wardner to await a hearing.

By Governor Steunenberg's directions, Sheriff Young was arrested, and other county officials were practically compelled to resign. The sheriff, who owed his election to the miners' union party, rode down to Wardner on the stolen train which carried the rioters and their dynamite...

It is interesting to note that the miner's union is controlled by Swedes and Italians, with a sprinkling of Finns and Cornishmen. Out of one hundred and thirty-two prisoners, only twenty-six claimed to be natives of the United States. The rest were all evidently and confessedly foreigners. That a long period of lawlessness, during which both life and property have been insecure, had finally convinced the people of the Coeur d'Alenes of their inability to control this reckless element appears in the statement of our correspondent. "The residents of Wardner," he writes, "are anxious to have martial law maintained and a permanent military post established here..."

The men who secured the leadership in the union during the strikes of 1892 have held sway ever since, and dynamiters have terrorized the district, even committing murder with impunity. "It has been a weekly occurrence for them to 'run men down the canyon' at the point of guns." By electing county officers from their own ranks, they provided for their own safety, and so completely have grand juries been intimidated that no juror would think of calling the murderers to account without accepting the risk of assassination for himself. When a man who...had been killed by the dynamiters was found in the road with an axe in the back of his head, the coroner's jury returned a verdict of suicide!
Source: "The Wardner Riot," Harper's Weekly, 43:2213 (May 20, 1899):498.

ARMY LIFE IN NEBRASKA: THE FORT ROBINSON YMCA
Black soldiers in the West, even more than their white counterparts, were isolated from the region's social and cultural life. In response, they created diverse educational and social institutions as alternatives to the saloons and brothels which many people both inside and outside the military considered the only organized activity necessary for off-duty soldiers. In the following vignette we see the efforts of Tenth Cavalry soldiers at Fort Robinson, a western Nebraska military outpost, to develop themselves through the post YMCA during the first decade of the 20th Century.
When the Tenth Calvary arrived at Fort Robinson in the spring of 1902 for a five-year tour of duty, it already had its regimental branch of the YMCA. Chaplain William T. Anderson and some of the enlisted men had created the organization in 1900 when the regiment garrisoned several Cuban towns following the Spanish-American War. Chaplain Anderson, who was born a slave in pre-Civil War Texas and became a medical doctor and author as well as an African Methodist Episcopal clergyman, often spoke proudly of the efforts of the YMCA in his monthly reports.

Members met on Wednesday evenings, both in Cuba and later at Robinson. Meetings at Fort Robinson first took place in the antiquated post amusement hall, which also served as post chapel and schoolroom. Later, the men met in the post gymnasium, completed in 1904. According to S.J. Willoughby of A Troop, programs were "nearly always along literary lines," and included recitations, musical presentations, essays and debates. Willoughby boasted that the intellectual efforts of the men "compared favorably with those in may college literary societies."

The quality of the programs may have been one of the reasons for the Y.M.C.A.'s great popularity. Chaplain Anderson noted in late 1902 that 450 of the garrison's 544 enlisted men were members, and as many as 342 soldiers attended a single Wednesday meeting at the fort. Attendance was not always high, however, and fluctuated considerably over the years due to adverse weather conditions and various military duties, such as guard and fatigue. Infrequently military operations such as the Ute expedition of 1906, forced YMCA activities to halt temporarily...

Some of the programs focused explicitly on the problems of black Americans. Essays such as the one presented by Beverly F. Thornton, the 44-year-old Alabaman who was a cook in K Troop, show that physical and occupational distance from the black civilian community did not isolate the troops emotionally or intellectually. Thornton exhorted forty-six of his colleagues at the January 4, 1905, meeting to the assiduous practice of thrift. He argued that in order for Afro-Americans to become a "respected people," each man had to diligently place a portion of his income aside. Regular saving, he said, would form a buffer against servitude in times of want. Those who failed to save inevitably became servile: When they faced acute distress they would be able to "neither command their time nor choose how or where they should live."

Corporal Joseph Wheelock of K Troop also read a paper which emphasized race consciousness. His essay, entitled, "Our Own Editors and Publishers," strongly urged his fellows to patronize race magazines and newspapers. Wheelock alerted his audience to the available periodicals and bluntly asserted the alternative to loyal support in a pair of rhetorical questions: "Do we by our papers and magazines from other people whose greatest aim is to show us in the worst possible form to the world? Do we patronize the man who at the times is ready to minimize our true manliness?

The YMCA served the men of the Tenth at Robinson with other programs as well... Mrs. Henry Highland Garnett, widow of the famed abolitionist and clergyman, addressed 118 men in August, 1904. However...she could not elicit...nearly as much interest as a "Jubilee Concert" attended by over three hundred soldiers in January, 1903... Wherever they were stationed in the West, the black regulars acted in concert to meet needs with which the Army did not cope... The YMCA and other groups reveal...that the men regarded their connection to a general Afro-American community as a highly significant one, which the vigorously sought to preserve and enhance.

With all that is claimed for industrialism and with due honor to Mr. Booker T. Washington, I fee that what is proposed for the negro in that direction will not do the work. When the black man has learned the industrial trades and seeks work, he runs into the unions, where he his told that no negroes need apply. The white employer would employ him but is afraid; he knows the negro is entitled to work but he cannot give it to him.

We are urged to give up our claims to higher education. Tuskegee could not exist without higher education. Contact with men of brain, of high ideals, is essential. Even though our race has produced great painters and sculptors, such as Dunbar, we are urged to give up all these things in order that we may survive. What does survival mean? We know what it is to eat our own hearts; we know what it is to stifle our ideas. We also know what it is to do things right; to have the finger of scorn pointed our way because we do not come up to the white man's ideals.

History tells us of no race that has given up its best and highest ideals that has amounted to anything. When we are told to give up our highest ideals, our hearts tell us not to do it. The example of the white man tells us the same thing. We are not going to do it. And this is not the 'sassy nigger' that says this. It is the revolt of black American manhood.

All we ask is that the educated men and women of our universities be kind and magnanimous toward the negro. My people have already been greatly helped by your people. The people of the South have greatly aided my people.

All a negro asks is a white man's chance. Will you give it? Will you give the negroes a chance to build homes for themselves and a chance to make themselves good citizens?

Numerous official and personal documents describe the brazen attitude of the Tenth's officers that allowed the Carrizal fracas to occur. Investigating rumors of a large body of Carrancistas in the vicinity of Villa Ahumada, [General John J.] Pershing dispatched scouting forces under Captains Charles Boyd and Lewis Morey, leading seventy-nine experienced black cavalrymen. Although Pershing apparently issued clear orders to merely reconnoiter the area and avoid a fight, Boyd replied to his assistants that "we are going to Villa Ahumada with a chip on our shoulder. If they [the Mexicans] knock it off, General Funston will move and so will General Pershing." Arriving at Ahumada on June 20, Boyd confirmed the presence of Carrancista cavalry nine miles east at Carrizal. Despite warnings from assistants not to enter the town, Boyd muttered something about "making history" and declared his intent to confront the Mexicans directly.

Reaching Carrizal early next morning, the troops paused south of the village while Boyd and his assistants conferred with the Carrancista officers via interpreters. Ignoring a command not to proceed eastward, Boyd ordered his troops to advance forward in skirmish formation. A burst of machine-gun fire quickly split their ranks, dividing the blacks into separate groups. Boyd and the Mexican commander were among the first fatalities. Armed only with Springfield rifles, the Tenth had little protection against Mexican machine-guns. The total battle lasted less than an hour, evolving into a general melee that spread into Carrizal itself... For the next few hours, stragglers from the Tenth filtered through Villa Ahumada, obtaining food and medical treatment before scrambling back to Pershing's headquarters at Casas Grandes. Several days passed before all survivors were accounted for; many wandered listlessly on foot in the desert, disoriented and unable to locate base camp.

The Carrancistas, for their part, had no wish to pursue the black troops, content with collecting the wounded or surrendered prisoners. Lem Spilsbury, a Mormon scout with the Tenth and the only white to be captured, later described how the prisoners' dark skin merited no special consideration. Originally lining up the "gringo dogs" for execution, the Mexicans instead stripped all the captives naked and marched them to a nearby rail line for incarceration in Chihuahua City. Mistaken for a Hispanic, Spilsbury claimed several Mexicans favored shooting him as a traitor. During the overnight ride to Chihuahua, mobs gathered at each town where the train passed, demanding the murder of the "gringos." Upon arrival, the Carrizal survivors, some injured and all still lacking clothes, were marched a mile and a half through the Chihuahua streets to the penitentiary...

Publicly, the U.S. government praised Boyd and his troops for valorous service, even though the accounts of Carrizal's survivors over the next week made clear that Boyd had disobeyed written orders not to provoke conflict. Despite the fact that this left [President Woodrow] Wilson unable to assume any moral high ground, he issued a formal statement on June 25 condemning Mexico's actions and demanded the immediate release of Spilsbury and the black soldiers. As a show of strength, Wilson mobilized guard units on the border for imminent invasion... In Chihuahua, military authorities blustered, "If the United States wants its soldiers who are held here as prisoners of war, the best way would be to come down and take them..." The racial origin of the hostages, on whose fate rested the question of war or peace, apparently mattered little to either side... Uniform rather than skin color seemed more important as U.S. citizens' own patriotism demanded the release of men already coming to be regarded as heroes...
Source: James N. Leiker, "Fracas at El Carrizal: The Intersection of Race and Nationalism in United States/ Mexico Relations, 1916," (Paper presented at the Western History Association Meeting, Denver, October, 1995) pp. 22-27.