Little-known Buffalo Soldier’s story comes to life in new book
I’ve known Austin writer Sarah Bird for, I’m guessing, 25 or 30 years. What I didn’t know until recently is that for all those years and longer, my friend has been trying to tell the true-life tale of a remarkable woman almost lost to history.
Now, after publishing 10 novels whose characters include Air Force brats in Japan, flamenco dancers in Albuquerque, society women in Austin and ne’er-do-well rodeo performers in Texas and New Mexico and after 40 years of contemplation, rumination and research, she’s figured out how to introduce her readers to the only woman known to have served with the legendary Buffalo Soldiers while masquerading as a man. Sarah’s new novel about the real-life Cathy Williams is called “Daughter of a Daughter of a Queen,” published by St. Martin’s Press.
Talking by phone from the car as her husband George Jones drove through a thunderstorm toward Houston a couple of days ago — she had readings this week at Blue Willow Bookshop and Brazos Bookstore — Sarah said she first heard of Cathy (sometimes spelled Cathay) Williams in the late 1970s. She was doing research in Houston at the time on African-American rodeos, specifically Mollie Stevenson’s Diamond L Riding & Roping Club, a few miles south of today’s NRG Stadium.
“Since the first moment I heard about her existence,” Sarah said, “I was kind of haunted by why she alone made this choice” — both to be a soldier in the American Southwest during the Indian Wars and to masquerade as a man. She fictionalized Williams’ life, largely because she’s a novelist, but also because
the historical record is scant.
In pre-internet days, she had research help from her friend Pam Black, an Austin kindergarten teacher who was looking for role models who resembled her predominantly African-American students. What the two women discovered is that Williams was born in about 1844 to an enslaved mother and a free father on a plantation near Independence, Mo. During her adolescence she worked as a house slave on a plantation near Missouri’s state capital, Jefferson City, a town occupied by Union forces during the early days of the Civil War.
Captured slaves were designated as “contraband” and forced to serve the army in support roles. As a cook and washerwoman with forces commanded by Gen. Philip Sheridan, Williams witnessed the Battle of Pea Ridge, the Battle of Cedar Creek and other significant engagements while traipsing with the army across much of the southeastern United States.
As a female, Cathy Williams was prohibited from serving in the military, but “William Cathay” could. Somehow, she/he managed to pass a medical exam and to enlist in 1866. During the Civil War, more than 400 women are known to have served while posing as male soldiers, but Williams was the first documented woman to enlist in the army after the war. She’s the only documented African-American woman to serve prior to the 1948 law that gave women permanent status in the army’s regular and reserve forces.
She was assigned to the 38th U.S. Infantry Regiment, the Buffalo Soldiers. Although we know little about her service, we do know she endured hard duty during a winter campaign against the Apache in southwest New Mexico.
Williams managed to keep her secret for nearly two years, until she got sick while stationed in New Mexico.
The post surgeon made the surprise discovery and informed the post commander. By Oct. 14, 1868, Private Bill Cathay was once again Cathy Williams. She received an honorable discharge.
So how did she get away with it? How did this ambitious young woman become Private Cathay, and why did she decide that the military was the life for her?
What did she accomplish while serving in the ranks? And what became of her after her life as a soldier?
Taking the fragments that we have from history and conjuring up answers to those basic questions, Sarah brings to life a fleshand-blood human being who, in the words of Dallas writer Ben Fountain, “fears and loves and wants and hurts just as fiercely as any of us.” It’s a superb achievement.
She asserts her license as a novelist to diverge occasionally from recorded history. For example, she gives Williams an awareness of her noble African ancestry (“daughter of a daughter of a queen”).
She has Williams and her regiment stationed at the fictional version of Fort Davis, in West Texas, because the New Mexico fort where the actual regiment was stationed was made of adobe and has dissolved back into the earth. Fort Davis, of course, is a reconstructed national historic site, thus making it easier to research the Buffalo Soldier era.
She also put Williams atop a horse, in the cavalry, a more romantic endeavor than eating dust with the infantry. And she included a fictional love interest (fitting, it seems to me, since Sarah has published five romance novels under a pseudonym.)
Following her discharge, the real Cathy Williams worked as a cook at Fort Union, N.M., and later moved to Pueblo, Colo.
She married, although her husband stole her money and a team of horses, and Williams had him arrested. Fleeing the unfortunate union, she moved to Trinidad, Colo., where she worked as a seamstress and perhaps ran a boardinghouse. In 1876, the St. Louis Daily Times published an account of her military service.
Around 1889 or 1890, Williams entered a local hospital and applied for a disability pension based on her military service. The government denied her application, even though she suffered from diabetes and walked with a crutch because all her toes had been amputated. She is thought to have died in 1893.
A couple of days ago, Kiesha Lewis, a Southwest Airlines employee based in Omaha, Neb., was studying the Cathy Williams exhibit at Houston’s Buffalo Soldiers National Museum.
Lewis had been introduced to Williams the day before when she came across an exhibit while touring the USS Lexington in Corpus Christi Bay.
“She captivated me,” Lewis said, standing before a mannequin dressed to represent Williams during her Buffalo Soldier days. “I went through that whole ship, and I kept thinking about her.”
After all her years of research and her struggle to tell the story, Sarah Bird also can’t get Cathy Williams out of her mind. “I miss her,” she said. “Now that the book’s out, she’s out in the world making new friends, and she’s left me behind.
“It’s sort of like post-partum depression.”