SALT LAKE CITY — “There’s a mountain of history about these guys that had never been really tapped into, and we realized it was much broader than we thought — kind of like an iceberg.”
That’s Ian Wright talking. He’s the manager of Utah Cultural Site Stewardship, a state program tasked with “protecting and safeguarding Utah’s archaeological and cultural heritage.”
In simpler terms, they’re in charge of preserving Utah’s history.
The office has been operational for a little over four years, during which time Wright and his second-in-command, Lexi Little, have discovered an interesting pattern that repeats itself: When they start researching one bit of history, they often discover another bit that’s even more interesting.
Such is the case with the Buffalo Soldiers — two U.S. Army all-African American regiments that were stationed in Utah between 1878 and 1901. Thanks to Utah Cultural Site Stewardship, these men who played an important role in Utah history are getting a chance to take a bow more than a century later.
For our interview with Wright and Little, we’re sitting in the Fort Douglas Military Museum on the University of Utah campus.
Today, the museum’s buildings house an impressive array of military artifacts and information dating from the current day all the way back to 1862, when Fort Douglas was first created as a federal military garrison.
But back in the late 1800s, these were the barracks where the Buffalo Soldiers lived.
The story of the Buffalo Soldiers — so nicknamed by Native Americans because their coarse hair reminded them of a buffalo’s — is one of those cringe-worthy parts of American history, hearkening back to a time when even the Union triumph in the Civil War failed to put the brakes on racial bigotry.
In 1866, a year after the end of the war, the federal government decreed that the U.S. Army would be segregated (and would remain so for nearly 100 years), designating that four regiments (out of 60) were to be composed of all-Black troops.
Two of these regiments, the 9th Cavalry and the 24th Infantry, would be posted to Utah between 1878 and 1901, sent to keep the peace, guard the mail, protect the telegraph lines and keep the Native Americans in check. The 9th Cavalry helped establish Fort Duchesne in Uintah County, while the 24th Infantry was billeted, as mentioned above, in the barracks at Fort Douglas on the east side of Salt Lake City.
The ironies and incongruities of this arrangement were not a few: Black troops, already marginalized, sent to help protect and live in peace in a place populated primarily by members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — a people who A) had their own issues about being marginalized after being forced out of their homes in Illinois without much federal support and being invaded by the U.S. Army not long after they fled to Utah, and B) whose church restricted some of its membership rights from Black people.
Not to mention the fact that Fort Douglas, home of the 24th, was named after Stephen A. Douglas, Abraham Lincoln’s debate rival who had been a slave owner himself.
But here’s the part that brings a light to the eyes of Wright and Little as they talk about the Buffalo Soldiers era in Utah history: The interaction seems to have worked out just fine.
There were no race riots, no protests of any historical consequence. The role the Buffalo Soldiers played was, by all accounts, a positive one.
The 9th Cavalry not only helped calm tensions with the Ute Tribe in northeastern Utah, but also (although this hasn’t been entirely substantiated) helped guard the train depot in Price from a rumored heist by Butch Cassidy and the Robbers Roost gang.
The 24th Infantry gained fame by answering the government’s call to briefly leave Fort Douglas and fight in the Spanish-American War in Cuba in 1898 — charging up San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders. When the troops returned to Salt Lake City, they marched up Main Street in a parade in their honor.
“Not a lot of people know the Buffalo Soldiers were here,” says Wright, “but they were everywhere. Every time we did research, they popped up.”
Adds Little, “It is a vital story that needs to be told.”
The Utah Cultural Site Stewardship program has established a Heritage Trail that maps all the areas in Utah where the Buffalo Soldiers made their mark (it’s 475 miles in length), and a website — tinyurl.com/bshtstorymap — that details the history in great depth. There is also an audiobook available at tinyurl.com/bsht-audiobook, narrated by former KSL Radio talk show host Doug Wright (Ian Wright’s dad).
In short, if any of those Buffalo Soldiers were still around, they would no doubt be gobsmacked by all the attention.
“Our job is to safeguard all 13,000 years of Utah history,” says Ian Wright. “This was a gap, and we filled it.”
The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.