Black soldier, Indian war period, Infantry, Co. D with shoulder knots, holding noncom sword, wearing aiguelette, crossed rifles with “D” on kepi, white gloves plus three service stripes (i.e., fifteen years service)
CHAPTER 2
Few people realize the hardships and privations endured by these soldiers during the 1860s and 1870s. Their service and sacrifices have rarely been appreciated; only the mountains and plains of the Great West know the story of their devotion to duty; and many a hero sleeps in an unknown grave, where his only requiem is sung by the tall sycamores and cottonwoods that border some nameless stream.1
—George W. Ford, First Sergeant, Tenth Cavalry, 1924
At the turn of the century, many resplendent images of black Medal of Honor recipients in their formal wear were captured for posterity. In 1900, Thomas Calloway organized an exhibit for the Paris Exposition designed to educate the international public about African-American life, education, and literature. Housed in the Palace of Social Economy and earning one of the Exposition’s gold medals for excellence, the images, charts, and graphs were multidimensional in scope and panoramic in focus, covering the social and economic progress of African Americans since the Civil War.
Among the displays was a three-volume collection of photographs compiled by a precocious young sociologist named William Edward Burghardt Du Bois. Du Bois was about to embark on a defining journey, well on his way to being recognized as one of the foremost intellectuals of the twentieth century. He had just published his epic study, The Philadelphia Negro, and was starting to write the engaging yet haunting semiautobiographical The Souls of Black Folk. Soon after the venerable scholar had arrived in Georgia and assumed his professorship at Atlanta University, he witnessed the ghastly April 1899 lynching of farmer Sam Hose. Desperately trying to make sense of the epidemic of mob violence being meted out against blacks across the country, Du Bois aimed to use his collection of photographs to challenge racist discourse and perceptions of black criminality, as well as present African-American middle-class respectability to a wider audience.
Among the 360 prints that Du Bois compiled were single and collective portraits taken of living soldiers and sailors who had received the nation’s highest award for valor, from the Civil War through the Spanish-American War. The Civil War MOH recipients included Powhatan Beaty, William Carney, Christian Fleetwood, James Gardner, James Harris, Thomas Hawkins, Milton Holland, Alexander Kelly, John Lawson, and Robert Pinn.
Du Bois’s photographic essay also contained dignified images of four of the eighteen African-American soldiers who received the Medal of Honor for valiant service during the Indian Wars of the western United States: John Denny, Isaiah Mays, Thomas Shaw, and Brent Woods. The service records of MOH recipients Dennis Bell, Fitz Lee, and William Thompkins from the Spanish-American War were also included among the exhibit items.
The promising young scholar-activist considered these soldiers members of a talented tenth of a new generation of African Americans, and the photographs represented how they wished to be perceived by people at home and abroad. Du Bois claimed, “Not the least contribution to history is the case given to Negro Medal of Honor men in the army and the navy—from the man who ‘seized the colors after two color-bearers had been shot down and bore them nobly through the fight’ to the black men who ‘voluntarily went ashore in the face of the enemy and aided in the rescue of their wounded comrades.’”2
As part of his exhibit, Du Bois described the African-American military experience in the Trans-Mississippi West during the late nineteenth century. For many black regulars, the West was a world marked by dust and drought, one in which loyalty to and protection of one’s troops was critical to the black military experience. It was a place where one’s reputation as a person rested upon being known by all for strength, ferocity, and toughness. Indeed, having good character and ensuring that “your word is your bond” were necessary accoutrements of this value system. The environment and its rough-and-tumble characteristics were as invaluable as the stripes of rank one earned while serving in the West itself.
Those who donned the nation’s uniform faced a different set of problems in the Trans-Mississippi West. The Mexican border along the lower Rio Grande called for greater troop presence to stave off a French invasion of Mexico and to forestall the creation of a European government. Throughout the Trans-Mississippi West, Regular Army units were stationed at nearly 260 military posts, part of a vast constellation of departments and districts running from Arizona to Oregon and from Montana to Texas.
Meanwhile, the growing presence of settlers in the Great Plains after the Civil War forced the army to provide additional regiments and companies to guard against the increasing possibility of Indian hostility in the region. Only three regiments of cavalry, the 3rd, 7th, and 10th, and four regiments of infantry were assigned to the Department of Missouri—an area that covered all of Kansas, Missouri, Indian Territory, and the Territory of New Mexico. As Maj. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan observed during the late 1860s, “Part of this section of country—western Kansas, particularly—had been frequently disturbed and harassed during two or three years past, the savages every now and then massacring an isolated family, boldly attacking the surveying and constructing parties of the Kansas-Pacific railroad, sweeping down on emigrant trains, plundering and burning stage-stations and the like along the Smoky Hill route to Denver and the Arkansas route to New Mexico.”3
Where military district commanders like Philip Sheridan perceived danger, others—such as future MOH recipient, Emanuel Stance—saw a new life and unexplored vistas of opportunity. Born in 1843, Stance grew up in East Carroll Parish, Louisiana, and toiled as a sharecropper. At nineteen, he went to the closest recruiting station he could find and traveled to Lake Providence, Louisiana, where he joined Company F of the 9th Cavalry. Shortly afterward, he and a group of fifty fellow recruits withstood six months of basic training at New Orleans before they were transferred to Carrollton, Louisiana, in February of 1867. Standing just over five feet tall and possessing a rather unassuming personality, Stance’s ability to read and write and his talents as a natural leader of men were immediately recognized by his superiors. He advanced from private to corporal to sergeant in a matter of months, and earned a two-month leave of absence. In the spring of 1867, Stance and his Company F counterparts, along with other elements of the 9th Cavalry, were ordered to San Antonio, Texas, to practice field instruction. Within two months, the cavalry regiment had reached full strength, with nearly one thousand enlisted men and a steadily growing number of officers.
It was in San Antonio that Stance and the men underwent their baptism by fire. Among their assigned duties were putting down Native American uprisings, policing and protecting American settlers and railroad crews, guarding stage and mail routes in western Texas, and building roads and military installations. However, they also spent much of their time performing garrison and fatigue duty (nonmilitary labor, like digging or cleaning). After being transferred west to Fort Davis, Stance and Company F spent much of the next two and a half years helping open the Western territory that stretched from Fort Clark through El Paso, and from the Rio Grande to the Concho.4
On May 20, 1870, Stance, with a small party of men from Company F, received orders from their company commander to leave Fort McKavett and advance twenty miles north toward Kickapoo Springs. Apache Indians had abducted Phillip Bruckmeier’s two stepchildren from Loyal Valley, and it had been four days since they had seen the children. The detachment of men had barely made it halfway to their destination when they spotted a group of approximately twenty Indians driving a team of horses.
Stance took command of the situation, quickly organizing the men into a lined, mounted formation and charging the confused enemy forces until they had captured nine of their horses. After pursuing the Indian party into the hills, Stance and his men abandoned the attack and bivouacked for the night. They had decided to return to Fort McKavett the following morning. The next day, the patrol decamped and proceeded toward the post. A group of Indians stood in their way, intent on capturing a herd of government horses. The Indians flanked left and Stance directed his comrades against the advancing Indians. Stance managed to stave off the enemy advance, forcing them to flee, and sustaining minimal injuries to his men and horses in the process.
“The gallantry displayed by the Sergeant and his party, as well as the good judgement used on both occasions, deserves much praise.”
Capt. Henry Carroll, Stance’s commanding officer, heard this story and recommended the diminutive noncommissioned officer for the Medal of Honor. Of Stance’s activities under fire, Carroll said, “The gallantry displayed by the Sergeant and his party, as well as the good judgement used on both occasions, deserves much praise. As this is the fourth and fifth encounter that Sergeant Stance has had with Indians within the past two years, on all of which occasions he has been mentioned for good behavior by his immediate commanding officer, it is a pleasure to commend him to higher authority.”
On June 28, 1870, Stance received the nation’s highest honor for valor, becoming the first black regular in the post–Civil War era to garner such attention. In a letter acknowledging receipt of the award, Stance mused, “I will cherish the gift as a thing of priceless value and endeavor by my future conduct to merit the high honor conferred upon me.”5
In late January 1877, a small group of six troopers with the 9th Cavalry, along with three Navajo scouts, moved out from Fort Bayard. They had received orders to search for Indian raiders who had been active in an area located about thirty-five miles east of Fort Cummings. The soldiers aimed to suppress future attacks by hostile Chiricahua Apaches, who posed a potential threat to the New Mexico border. The arid conditions surrounding the San Carlos reservation located just northeast of the Gila River, where the Apaches resided, proved to be virtually uninhabitable. Indian raiding parties roamed through the territory in search of food and more desirable terrain. The situation intensified as more army troops poured into the area to suppress the hostile Indian forces.
Placed under the command of Lt. Henry Wright, the detachment had barely left the military installation and was approaching an area near the Florida Mountains when they discovered an encampment of nearly fifty hostile Indians. The troop was outnumbered. Wright and his men calmly approached the Apache council, hoping to negotiate peaceful terms. It was not to be. As Apache warriors surrounded them, troopers began laying down a suppressive line of fire.
When the shooting devolved to close-quarter, hand-to-hand combat, Cpl. Clinton Greaves, a native of Prince George’s County, Maryland, found himself at the epicenter of the fighting. Using his empty carbine as a club, he beat off the band of attacking Apaches. By taking such bold action, the five-foot-seven-inch noncommissioned officer created an opening that allowed his comrades to escape the nightmare. In this brief half hour of fighting, Greaves and the detachment of soldiers managed to kill five Indians and capture several rifles and eleven horses in the process.
For his efforts, Clinton Greaves would receive the Medal of Honor on June 26, 1879. While the actions taken by Lieutenant Wright and his men during the conflict with the Apaches received immediate attention from the Fort Bayard post commandant, official recognition of Greaves’s loyalty and devotion to his comrades at the front that day would have to wait until months later.6
Greaves was no stranger to adversity. Born in 1855 in Madison County, Virginia, he moved to Maryland’s Prince George’s County, where he worked for a short time as a day laborer. At the age of twenty-two, he enlisted in the army and was assigned to the 9th Cavalry, while the unit was stationed at Fort Bayard. On the heels of his heroic encounter in the Florida Mountains, Greaves had reenlisted in the army and worked as a blacksmith with H Troop at Fort Stanton, New Mexico, where he managed to maintain an unblemished record as a first-rate soldier.
Greaves was no stranger to adversity.
When Wright requested that Greaves receive a Certificate of Merit along with the Medal of Honor for his heroism in southwestern Mexico, his recommendation became ensnarled in technicalities that were commonplace in the nineteenth-century peacetime army. In Wright’s view, even though Greaves protected the provisions that sustained the men in his detachment, according to the rules, the fact that the intrepid corporal was a noncommissioned officer disqualified him for the certificate. Only after Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman interceded on his behalf did Greaves receive the War Department’s official acknowledgment of his gallant deed.
Despite these obstacles, Greaves’s loyalty to the 9th Cavalry and his devotion to his unit remained unwavering. He would spend twenty years on active duty before retiring from the army in 1893. After moving to Ohio, he worked as a civilian employee with the quartermaster department at Columbus Barracks until his death, in 1906.7
Pompey Factor and other Seminole-Negro Indian Scout Medal of Honor Recipients in Southern Texas
Throughout the 1870s, Seminole-Negro Indians were recruited by the US Army to serve as scouts along the Texas border. Approximately fifty-three of the recruits descended from African Americans who had fled the harsh conditions of slavery in antebellum Florida. They had married among Seminole Indians for protection against being recaptured by marauding slave catchers. After being forced to move westward by the US government during the late 1830s and early 1840s, the majority of their families settled on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande District.
By the end of the Civil War, a series of costly skirmishes with Native American tribes had taken place on the Texas frontier. Maj. Zenas Bliss of the 25th Cavalry realized he needed residents with local knowledge to best patrol the borders. In March of 1870, Bliss invited a group of Black Seminoles to return to the United States to serve as scouts. In return for their service, the US government agreed to provide them with cavalryman’s pay, provisions for their families, and grants of land. In less than three months, many of these families had accepted the offer and crossed the border into Texas. In August, the first group of scouts traveled to Fort Duncan.8
Among the first Black Seminole scouts who appeared at the Texas installation that month was Pompey Factor. Born in Arkansas, he was a product of the forced removal of Seminoles to the Indian Territory during the 1840s. Standing five-foot-eight with black hair and eyes, Factor was twenty-one years old and at the height of his physical powers when he enlisted at Fort Duncan. He and ten other newly recruited scouts received Sharp’s carbines at the fort, but they had to furnish their own horses. Factor and his fellow scouts were noted for their skill as exceptional hunters and fearless fighters. Their commanding officers also praised them for their ability to fluently speak, interpret, and translate languages commonly spoken by indigenous populations that lived on the Texas–Mexico border.
Kentucky-born ex-slave and 9th Cavalry member Jacob Wilks had a clear image of Black Seminole scouts like Factor who served on the frontier: “Many of these were part Indian. They all spoke Spanish; only a few of them, the Texas ex-slaves, spoke any English, and were conceded to be the best body of scouts, trailers, and Indian fighters ever engaged along the border.” Their heroics would be shared in family lore for more than a century.
During the spring of 1875, Factor found himself summoned to glory at the Eagle’s Nest Crossing of the Pecos River. On April 16, he, two fellow Black Seminole scouts, and 1st Lt. John Bullis of the 24th Infantry rode out of Fort Clark, heading toward the lower Pecos River. Accompanying an element of the 25th Infantry en route from Fort Stockton, their mission was to ride one hundred miles northwest to investigate a large party of Comanche who had allegedly stolen seventy-five horses. The Comanche had encamped along the banks of the lower Pecos River where it emptied into the Rio Grande. After spending nearly a week with soldiers of the 25th in pursuit of the elusive party, Bullis decided on April 22 to strike out southwest toward the Pecos. After discovering signs of a group of Indians near Johnson’s Run, a dry arroyo on the east side of the river, Factor and his party continued southwest until they reached the mouth of Howard’s Creek. There they enjoyed a rare opportunity to rest and water and feed their horses before picking up the trail west toward the Rio Grande a few hours later.
On the morning of April 25, the scouting party had marched twenty miles south down the Rio Grande and crossed the Pecos when they stumbled upon a fresh set of horse tracks heading northwest, toward Eagle’s Nest Crossing. As Bullis filed in his report, “The trail was quite large and came from the direction of the settlements and was made, I judge, by seventy-five head or more, of horses.” The spirited junior officer and his scouts promptly pursued the new trail for nearly an hour before running almost headlong into the raiding party and the stolen horses. Undetected, the reconnaissance team dismounted and exchanged a volley of fire with the enemy combatants, killing three Comanche and capturing their herd of horses twice, before being forced to withdraw.
During the skirmish, Pvt. Pompey Factor and two other scouts distinguished themselves in action. Their commanding officer had lost his horse and was now on foot, standing directly in the path of the onrushing Indians. The scouts laid down supportive fire to their left and right flank while riding through the Comanche party. At the same time, one of them raced through the enemy, pulling Bullis up onto his horse and out of harm’s way. Shortly afterward, the men returned to Fort Clark virtually unscathed, having successfully confronted enemy forces and accomplished the mission at hand. Of the hair-raising moment and the willingness of the men to risk life and limb on his behalf that day, Bullis commented a day later, “They are brave and trustworthy, and are each worthy of a medal.” On May 28, 1875, Factor and his fellow scouts received the Medal of Honor for their “gallantry in action.”9
The Seminole-Negro Indian scouts continued to serve with the US Army on the southwest Texas–northern Mexico frontier. Most of them probably had the same experiences with frontier honor as Pompey Factor—a brief moment in the sun as a famous Indian War hero, followed by racial resentment harbored by indigenous populations living on the border.
Factor served intermittently in the army throughout the 1870s before deserting military service for Mexico in 1877, where he rode for two years with Col. Pedro Avincular Valdez, a famous Mexican Indian fighter. In May of 1879, Factor returned to Fort Clark, Texas, where the army restored him to active duty as a scout, but garnished the previous wages he had earned during his absence as punishment for his indiscretion. While his reasons for deserting remain unclear, it is conceivable that interethnic strife and violence meted out against Black Seminole scouts who served on the Texas border may have been root causes for his defection. Factor remained at Fort Clark until he was mustered out of the army in November of 1880, at the ripe old age of thirty. But he continued to wage war against what he perceived as personal affronts to his reputation.
As a case in point, Factor eventually moved to south Texas where he engaged in subsistence farming in Brackettville, Texas, and Muzquiz, Mexico. During the period, he and his descendants filed a petition with the US government in 1926, demanding compensation for his military service and status as a Medal of Honor recipient. After his death in 1928, Factor’s reputation as a nineteenth-century hero was shrouded in ignominy, including the fact that he was laid to rest in an unmarked grave that failed to meet the standards of honor.
His application for government recognition did bear fruit several generations later. In 1991, descendants of the Seminole-Negro Indian scouts traveled to a rural tribal cemetery outside of Brackettville and looked on with pride as the army paid homage to the memory of Factor and his fellow scouts, Isaac Paine, Adam Payne, and John Ward, by placing Medal of Honor headstones over their grave sites.10
Benjamin Brown and Isaiah Mays and the Wham Robbery of 1889
During the late 1880s, African-American soldiers were stationed in the Far Southwest at Forts Grant, Thomas, Bowie, and Apache. They performed myriad duties ranging from digging holes, planting poles, and stringing telegraph wire to renovating military posts, surveying, mapping, and building new roads, and locating sources of water for newly arrived settlers. Some of the most important assignments given to black units garrisoned at these posts involved preventing whites from venturing onto reservations in the Indian Territory, as well as providing an armed presence for stagecoaches, trains, wagons, railroad crews, surveying parties, and paymasters who traveled between military outposts in the region. The latter engaged and taxed the energies of even the most committed and dedicated members of the Buffalo Soldier units. According to one historian, “Because Indian Territory was off limits to white settlers and travelers, the garrisons were more isolated than usual from civilization. The army had to build its own access roads to the posts, and what travel did occur in Indian Territory was restricted to official business with the army garrisons or Indian agencies.” Members of the 24th Infantry faced a combustible mix of violence, lawlessness, political instability, latent anger toward Official Washington, and religious intolerance that combined with white animosity toward the presence of armed black troops.11
This was the volatile environment that shaped the acts of courage performed by Sgt. Benjamin Brown and Cpl. Isaiah Mays on the morning of May 11, 1889. A day earlier, the two men had been ordered to travel from Fort Grant to a nearby railroad depot where they were to accompany veteran paymaster Maj. Joseph Wham and his clerk, William Gibbon, along with a party of ten young privates, on a mission to Fort Thomas. The War Department had asked Wham and other paymasters to travel throughout the Department of Arizona to pay all troops listed among the April muster who served at Camp Carlos and Forts Bowie, Thomas, and Apache.
While traveling along the Fort Grant–Fort Thomas Road, the men were tasked with guarding a strongbox containing exactly $28,348.10, composed largely of gold and silver coins weighing approximately 250 pounds. The precious cargo was carried aboard an ambulance driven by a team of twelve army mules and supported by an open wagon driven by Brown, Mays, and seven other soldiers from the 24th Infantry.
Brown, a native who hailed from Spotsylvania County, Virginia, was one of the longest-serving soldiers of the group, having been in the army for eight years after enlisting at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1881. While relatively young, Brown’s reputation as a proficient soldier had earned him a series of promotions, from corporal to sergeant, and he was attracting the attention of his counterparts as an expert marksman. By the end of the 1890s, he would become a permanent fixture at rifle competitions held throughout the Department of Arizona. Born as a slave in Carter’s Bridge, Virginia, Isaiah Mays’s experience was also marked by an extended period of time in the Indian Territory of Arizona. The thirty-one-year-old had just risen to the rank of corporal before being assigned to this detail.
Much of the forty-two-mile trek from Fort Grant to Fort Thomas proved to be uneventful. As the men moved past Bonita, a small civilian community close to Fort Grant, as well as several prominent ranches in the territory, they encountered few obstacles. After passing Eureka Springs and making the climb through Eagle Pass to Cedar Springs, the soldiers changed teams, and Brown moved to sit alongside the paymaster’s driver. Fort Thomas was within sight. As the men rode through the last leg of the journey, they were probably eagerly awaiting the soft bedding of the barracks, some welcome victuals, and the chance to swap a few stories with their compatriots. But around 1:00 p.m. that day, the progress they had made seemed to be all for naught.
The men had driven five miles down a sharp cut of rock into a dry streambed called the Cottonwood Wash when Major Wham’s wagon came to a stuttering halt. The paymaster, his vision obstructed by the inside of the covered wagon, asked his team of drivers about the source of the team’s trouble. Brown replied, “A boulder is in the road, sir.” As the highest-ranking noncommissioned officer with the party, Brown quickly organized the soldiers to dislodge the rock from the road.12
As the men worked to remove the roadblock, they heard a series of gunshots ringing out from rocky formations above their positions. Pvt. George Short, a 24th infantryman with the escort party, later recalled, “There was a volley fired and at the same time, a voice said, ‘Git out, you black sons of bitches.’” In that instant, the army detail found themselves subjected to several fierce rounds of gunfire coming from highwaymen armed with Winchester rifles, fiercely determined to take the payroll from them.
With enemy bullets raining down on them, the escort party used the covered ambulances and fallen mules as defensive cover before regrouping behind a rocky ledge located nearby. During the holdup, Sergeant Brown used his revolver to answer the challenge laid down by the gang, firing upon them as they crouched behind cedar trees located above them. Brown continued discharging his weapon, laying down suppressive fire despite sustaining gunshot wounds to his left side. The wounded sharpshooter then ordered Private Short to give him his carbine, which Brown used to fire on the highwaymen. He continued shooting from a prone position until he received a bullet slug in his left forearm, totally incapacitating him. Meanwhile, Corporal Mays also fired on the robbers, emptying his revolver. Despite their valiant efforts, the bandits managed to obtain the payroll. Mays eventually ordered a retreat for the detail before “walking and crawling two miles to a nearby ranch in order to get help.”13
After the two-hour gun battle, an ambulance carrying members of the escort party made the twelve-mile journey to Fort Thomas. Eight members of the detail were severely wounded, and the army payroll belonging to the US government was now in the hands of the outlaw highwaymen. Nonetheless, the performances of Sergeant Brown and Corporal Mays during the ordeal impressed Major Wham to such an extent that he recommended them for Medals of Honor in September of 1889. Their “gallantry and meritorious action” was on full display during the skirmish, and Wham emphasized this point in his letter: “I was a soldier in Grant’s world regiment during the entire war; it was justly proud of its record of sixteen battles and of the reflected glory of its old Colonel, the ‘Great Commander,’” he stated. “[B]ut I never witnessed better courage or better fighting than [what was] shown by these colored soldiers, on May 11, 1889, as the bullet marks on the robbers’ positions to-day abundantly attest.”14
Wham’s request advanced slowly up the chain of command, through the Headquarters Department of Arizona, earning the approval of Col. Zenas Bliss, the 24th Infantry’s commanding officer, and landing on the desk of the Secretary of War in Washington.15
They heard a series of gunshots ringing out from rocky formations above their positions.
Before Wham’s endorsement arrived in the nation’s capital, a robust debate had ensued among Department of Arizona officers that reflected the wide range of interpretation within the late nineteenth-century army over military action in the Trans-Mississippi West. Some white officers like Joseph Wham recognized that the role of the Regular Army was moving beyond one of primarily protecting settlements from indigenous Indian populations. But policymakers stubbornly held on to their views about what constituted “distinguished action” on the battlefield. Nowhere were these differing views more evident than during the processing and awarding of Medals of Honor to the two standout heroes of the paymaster robbery.
After investigating the Wham robbery, the Department of Arizona’s acting inspector general disagreed with the paymaster’s recommendation, stating that the actions taken by Brown and Mays failed to pass the bar of “distinction on the field of battle” as specified by army regulations 175 and 176. “The fact remains that the robbers drove them away from the funds they were detailed to protect,” he stated.16 Major General Schofield, the army’s senior officer at the time, concurred, arguing that “these cases do not seem to be of that class properly designated as ‘extraordinary’ or ‘most distinguished.’”17 Schofield’s views failed to carry the day, however. Upon further investigation, Secretary of War Redfield Proctor overruled the dissenting views and awarded medals to the two men on February 19, 1890.18
Like their white counterparts, black Medal of Honor recipients in the post–Civil War army did not always follow the rules of frontier honor. Occasionally, their sense of manhood and character produced acts of rebellion, causing them to brush up against army standards—not to mention the military justice system that existed in the segregated army. The monotony of garrison duty in Indian Territory meant endless bouts of boredom, booze, and belligerency for restless black troopers. And frequently, disciplinary problems—both major and minor—arose, involving recruits and noncommissioned officers alike.
This was certainly the case for black MOH recipients during this period. Even while displaying extraordinary leadership skills on the Texas frontier, Emanuel Stance frequently violated army regulations, resulting in numerous garrison court-martial proceedings stemming from charges of “conduct prejudicial to good order and discipline” throughout the 1870s and early 1880s. Each time, he was fined, his rank was reduced, and he forfeited his pay and benefits.
Some MOH recipients found that their feelings about the army had profoundly changed after they were recognized for bravery. After receiving his medal, Cpl. Isaiah Mays reenlisted in 1891, only to reverse course and seek a discharge a year later. Ten years in the Far Southwest had apparently provided him with a strong desire to quit frontier life and return to his home state of Virginia. Mays registered his increasing frustration with his inability to support family members and his deeply felt yearning to leave military service: “My reasons for wanting my discharge is that my parents are old and they are not able to take care of themselves. I want to be with them so that I can properly support them.”
After the Secretary of War denied his request, Mays staged his own acts of rebellion, suggesting that his commanding officer’s rejection of his discharge was motivated by racial prejudice. As a consequence for his actions, he was reassigned to Fort Bayard, New Mexico, reduced in rank, and forced to relinquish pay in the process. In 1893, he got his chance to leave military service. He chose to remain in the Southwest, working as a miner in Arizona until his death in 1925.
Others devised more drastic strategies to bid farewell to military life. In April of 1891, Cpl. William O. Wilson—recognized by fellow soldiers within his battalion for his heroic actions during the 9th Cavalry’s Pine Ridge Campaign against the Sioux just a few months earlier—decided to leave his military outpost. He headed for southern Nebraska, without authorization from his superior officers.19
And sometimes, the same personal attributes and behavior that distinguished these men as tough and fearless fighters also predisposed them to volatile confrontations with other soldiers.
Intemperate action followed by charges of insubordination punctuated the career of 1st Sgt. John Denny after he won the Medal of Honor for service against the Apaches in 1879. During the spring of 1891, Denny came to blows with his fellow 9th cavalryman Lawrence Galloway after the enlisted man cheated him of three dollars and seventy-five cents. After Galloway called him a liar, the decorated noncommissioned officer angrily retorted, “You damned bastard—I’ll knock your goddamned head off!” At the court-martial that followed, Denny defended his actions by pointing to his exemplary military record: “I have always endeavored to perform my duties as a soldier. During any period while serving as a noncommissioned officer, I have taken every precaution practicable to preserve discipline.”20
Others devised more drastic strategies to bid farewell to military life.
Often such skirmishes ended in tragedy. Known by many as a hot-tempered heavy drinker, Emanuel Stance came to blows with many enlisted men before meeting his untimely demise at the hands of his own troops on Christmas morning of 1887.
After receiving his discharge from the 24th Infantry in 1875, Adam Payne found himself facing a warrant for his arrest when he stabbed a fellow soldier during a dance held near Brownsville, Texas. Not long afterward, Payne—whom his fellow servicemen had dubbed “Bad Man”—suffered a similar fate when a local deputy sheriff decided to act as judge, jury, and executioner in the case. Without bothering to arrest Payne, the law enforcement officer simply unloaded his double-barreled shotgun into the back of the former Black Seminole scout, killing him instantly.21
Meanwhile, Clinton Greaves, the hero of the Florida Mountains mission, spent nearly twenty years with the 9th Cavalry before he was transferred to Columbus Barracks, Ohio, in 1888. He worked there for five years before retiring from the army in 1893. While living in Ohio, he worked for the quartermaster department until he passed away in 1906, at the age of fifty-one. His wife, Bertha Williams, survived him by several decades, laboring as a domestic worker before dying in 1936. While Greaves was laid to rest in Columbus, Ohio, his likeness has been immortalized by a statue located at Fort Bayard, New Mexico.22
The Medal of Honor was the highlight in the careers of soldiers like Thomas Boyne, Thomas Shaw, Augustus Walley, Moses Williams, William Othello Wilson, and Brent Woods. Although little information exists about what happened to them after their moments of glory, the legacy of their service in the American West and their devotion to duty resonated in the memory of generations of African Americans at the end of the nineteenth century.
By the close of the 1890s, Elizabethtown, North Carolina, native William McBryar stood unwittingly between two worlds. Like most of his fellow Buffalo Soldiers, McBryar had witnessed firsthand the widespread changes occurring throughout the country. America’s industrial growth and increased presence on the global stage spelled a new set of challenges regarding race and gender for him and the twenty-two other MOH recipients who had served in the Indian-fighting army just after the Civil War. Beginning in the late 1870s and well into the 1880s, Jim Crow segregation, coupled with an epidemic of race pogroms and lynchings, had structured their lives from cradle to grave. And by the 1890s, McBryar and many other blacks were excluded from industrial jobs in the South, as more than 80 percent were relegated to domestic and day-laboring occupations in the region. In the North and major parts of the Midwest, job conditions for working-class blacks struck a similar dour note.
But here is where most of the similarities come to an end. In an era during which most African-American soldiers served as enlisted men and noncommissioned officers, McBryar stood worlds apart. Born in 1861 prior to the Civil War, he joined the army in 1887. Three years later, he was awarded the Medal of Honor for his “coolness, bravery, and good marksmanship” against the Apaches in southern Arizona as a sergeant with the 10th Cavalry’s K Company. When the United States became embroiled in the imperial wars against the Spanish regime in Cuba and in the insurgency in the Philippines, in 1898, McBryar rallied to the nation’s colors, serving admirably with the 25th Infantry in Santiago, Cuba. As a result of his gallantry during the campaign, he reported to Fort Thomas, Kentucky, where he earned a commission as a lieutenant with the 8th Volunteer Infantry.
Despite these accolades, McBryar craved a regular commission in the army. While serving as a junior officer with the 49th Volunteer Infantry in the Philippines, he frequently sought the aid of several senior officers in an effort to realize this dream—to no avail. Even though he eagerly volunteered his services during both World Wars, misfortune and age, combined with expanded Jim Crowism, frustrated his attempts at every turn.
After leaving the army in 1905, the eighty-year-old retired soldier moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he worked as a public school teacher until his death from cerebral thrombosis on March 8, 1941. A week later, he was interred in Arlington National Cemetery, thus becoming a permanent fixture in the collective memory of his Medal of Honor brethren and fellow soldiers. It would take several generations of black patriots serving their country in battle during the next century to realize his dream.23
Among those whose battlefield exploits during the Indian Wars are not described in this narrative are George Jordan and Henry Johnson.