They Sent the Black Cavalry to Die First — What Happened Next Shocked Everyone
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They patrolled the Texas frontier.
They fought the Comanche, the Apache, and the Kya in engagements that rarely made the newspapers.
They built roads, strung telegraph lines, escorted settlers, and guarded stage coach routes through territory so hostile that white regiments rotated out after 2 years, while black regiments stayed for five.
They did all of this while being denied promotions, underfunded, given the worst horses and the oldest equipment, and posted to forts so remote that the nearest town was a three-day ride.
They did it because they were soldiers, and because every mile of frontier they patrolled, every battle they fought, every fort they held was proof.
Proof that the country that had enslaved them could not function without them.
And in 1898, when the United States went to war with Spain, the Buffalo soldiers were about to prove it in a way that no one could ignore, and that the history books would spend the next century trying to erase.
The Spanishame War began in April 1898.
By June, American forces were landing in Cuba.
The 10th Cavalry was among them.
Shipped from Tampa, Florida on transport vessels so overcrowded that the men slept in shifts and the horses had to be pushed off the ships into the harbor and forced to swim to shore.
They arrived in Cuba exhausted, under supplied, and assigned to the most exposed positions on the line.
On July 1st, the assault on the San Juan Heights began.
The Spanish held the high ground.
They had fortified positions.
mouser rifles and clear lines of fire down every approach.
The American plan was simple and brutal.
Advance uphill, under fire, and take the positions by force.
The 10th Cavalry was ordered to take Kettle Hill, a fortified position to the right of San Juan Hill itself.
They were to advance across an open field, cross a river, and charge uphill into entrenched Spanish fire.
They had no artillery support.
The Gatling guns had not been brought forward.
They had rifles, bayonets, and the certain knowledge that the men who had written this order would not be among those carrying it out.
They went anyway.
The charge up Kettle Hill was not the orderly advance that military textbooks describe.
It was chaos.
Men running uphill through kneedeep grass while mouser bullets cracked past their heads.
Men falling.
Men stepping over the fallen.
men shouting, praying, cursing, and climbing.
The 10th cavalry reached the Spanish trenches at the top of the hill and fought handto hand.
They cleared the position.
They held it.
Then they kept going without orders, without waiting for reinforcement.
The 10th cavalry swept across the ridge line and joined the assault on San Juan Hill itself, where American forces were pinned down and taking heavy casualties.
The Buffalo soldiers hit the Spanish flank.
They turned the battle.
San Juan Hill fell.
The Spanish retreated and the road to Santiago Duba was open.
Here is the fact that most history books omit.
The 10th cavalry suffered the highest casualty rate of any regiment in the assault.
They lost 20% of their fighting strength in a single afternoon.
And they were not the ones who got the credit.
Theodore Roosevelt was at San Juan Hill that day.
He commanded the Rough Riders, a volunteer cavalry regiment that charged up the hill alongside the Buffalo Soldiers.
Roosevelt’s account of the battle published in his memoir described the charge as primarily a Rough Riders victory.
He mentioned the black soldiers only to suggest that some of them had tried to drift to the rear during the fighting and that white officers had to force them forward at gunpoint.
This was not true.
Every firsthand account from officers who served with the 10th and 9th cavalry contradicts it.
The Buffalo soldiers did not drift to the rear.
They led the charge.
They took the highest casualties.
They held the hill.
But Roosevelt’s version became the official version.
It was published.
It was taught.
It became the story America told itself about San Juan Hill.
A story about a white volunteer regiment and its future president, Colonel, charging gloriously into history.
The men who actually turned the battle.
The black cavalry who had served for 20 years in the worst postings the army could find.
Who had fought Comanche and Apache and Heat and Prejudice.
Who had earned the name Buffalo Soldiers and carried it uphill into Spanish fire were written out, not erased from the records.
The records exist.
The muster rolls, the casualty lists, the afteraction reports, they all confirm what happened.
The erasia was selective.
It was the eraser of emphasis, of narrative, of who gets to be the hero of the story.
For a century, the answer was not them.
But stories have a way of surviving the people who try to bury them.
And the reckoning, the real reckoning did not happen on the hill.
It happened in the decades after when the truth began to surface and could not be pushed back down.
The reckoning came slowly, the way reckonings do.
In 1899, Sergeant Major Edward Baker of the 10th Cavalry was awarded the Medal of Honor for voluntarily going under fire at Santiago Duba to rescue wounded soldiers.
Five Buffalo soldiers in total were awarded the Medal of Honor for actions in the SpanishAmerican War.
The 10th Cavalry went on to serve in the Philippines, in Mexico during the Punitive Expedition, and along the US border.
In every engagement, they fought with the same precision and courage they had shown at San Juan Hill.
In 1948, President Harry Truman desegregated the United States military with Executive Order 9,981.
The Buffalo Soldier Regiments were dissolved, not because they had failed, but because the army could no longer justify separating men by race when those men had proven repeatedly that they fought as well as anyone.
In 1992, a monument to the Buffalo Soldiers was erected at Fort Levvenworth, Kansas.
the same post where the 10th cavalry had been founded 126 years earlier.
General Colin Powell, the first black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, dedicated the monument and said words that every man of the 10th Cavalry had earned but never heard in their lifetimes.
In 2023, historians and scholars began a formal campaign to correct the record of San Juan Hill.
The National Park Service updated its interpretive materials.
New books were published.
The story was told again, but this time the Buffalo soldiers were not in the background.
They were where they had always been, in front.
They sent the black cavalry to die first.
That part of the story is true.
The men who wrote the orders believed that black soldiers were expendable.
What happened next was not what anyone expected.
Not the Spanish who were overwhelmed.
Not the officers who watched black troops turn the battle.
Not Roosevelt who spent the rest of his life rewriting the story.
And not the country which took a century to acknowledge what its own soldiers had done.
The Buffalo soldiers of the 10th Cavalry were never expendable.
They were essential.
They always had been.
From Fort Levvenworth to San Juan Hill, from the Texas frontier to the mountains of Arizona, they carried a weight the country refused to acknowledge and fought for a nation that refused to see them.
They saw themselves.
That was enough.
If this story stayed with you, tell me.
Why do you think Roosevelt tried to rewrite what happened on that hill? And if you want another story about the people history tried to forget, it’s right
