Growing
up, I dreamed of being Margaret Mead. When I realized that Margaret already had
that job, I turned my anthropologist’s eye for the defining details of
language, dress, and customs to fiction. I love to tell the untold
tales--especially about women--who are thrust into difficult, sometimes
impossible, circumstances and triumph with the help of humor, friends,
perseverance, and their own inspiring ingenuity. In my eleven bestselling
novels, I have been able to do this well enough that I was nominated for the
International Dublin Literary Prize and in 2021 was honored with the Paul Re
Peace Award for Cultural Advocacy for promoting empathy through my work.
Published more than a hundred years after the first Black regiments were formed during the Civil War, historian William Leckie’s marvel of a book was a landmark achievement. For the first time, the extraordinary contributions of the Buffalo Soldiers were documented and celebrated in exhaustive detail.
The Buffalo Soldiers was the Rosetta Stone I used for translating the few bald facts we have about Cathy’s life into a language vivid and vibrant enough to match her courageous decision to risk everything in pursuit of a life of freedom and dignity.
First published in 1967, the book is still in print. Attesting to the volume’s enduring popularity, nearly a dozen revisions and updates have been released since then.
Originally published in 1967, William H. Leckie's The Buffalo Soldiers was the first book of its kind to recognize the importance of African American units in the conquest of the West. Decades later, with sales of more than 75,000 copies, The Buffalo Soldiers has become a classic. Now, in a newly revised edition, the authors have expanded the original research to explore more deeply the lives of buffalo soldiers in the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry Regiments.
Written in accessible prose that includes a synthesis of recent scholarship, this edition delves further into the life of an African American soldier in…
Drawing from military records, newspaper articles, personal correspondence, and other source materials, historian Billington shows that despite often extreme prejudice, inferior equipment, and intense bigotry from the citizens they were protecting, the Buffalo Soldiers not just survived but triumphed. I particularly appreciated his focus on New Mexico as Cathy was posted in that state.
Billington has excavated a wealth of detail about the daily life of a Buffalo Soldier. He writes of them storing pickled meats, molasses, pickles, and vegetables, making 25,000 adobe bricks, burning smoky fires to control mosquitoes, and repairing hard to replace shoes. I found this granular examination of daily life invaluable in bringing Cathy to life.
I based one of the most riveting portions of Daughter on Carlson’s meticulously-researched account of what one newspaper called the “Staked Plains Horror.” And horror it was. In the middle of a dangerously dry summer, forty Buffalo Soldiers led by white officers set off on a routine scouting expedition. Several days later three Black troopers returned to report that all the men of Troop A were missing and presumed dead.
Eventually, all but four of the party made it back to Fort Concho with tales of having survived by drinking the blood of their dead horses and their own urine. Carlson’s careful examination of the records of the court-martial trials that followed reveal what a large role the officers’ bigotry and ineptitude played in triggering this catastrophe.
In the middle of the arid summer of 1877, a drought year in West Texas, a troop of some forty buffalo soldiers (African American cavalry led by white officers) struck out into the Llano Estacado from Double Lakes, south of modern Lubbock, pursuing a band of Kwahada Comanches who had been raiding homesteads and hunting parties. A group of twenty-two buffalo hunters accompanied the soldiers as guides and allies.
Several days later three black soldiers rode into Fort Concho at modern San Angelo and reported that the men and officers of Troop A were missing and presumed dead from thirst.…
I was delighted to discover this compilation of personal accounts by enlisted men who’d served in the U.S. Army during the settling of the American West. Though the educated class of officers left extensive documentation of their lives on the frontier, the mostly illiterate rank and file were unable to chronicle their experiences. Rickey filled this void in the early sixties by interviewing over three hundred troopers, both black and white, who were still alive at that time.
The wealth of detail they supplied was invaluable to me in creating both Cathy’s voice and the world she passed as a man in.
The enlisted men in the United States Army during the Indian Wars (1866-91) need no longer be mere shadows behind their historically well-documented commanding officers.
As member of the regular army, these men formed an important segment of our usually slighted national military continuum and, through their labors, combats, and endurance, created the framework of law and order within which settlement and development become possible. We should know more about the common soldier in our military past, and here he is.
The rank and file regular, then as now, was psychologically as well as physically isolated from most of his…
If you’d like to understand why Elmer Kelton was voted the greatest Western writer of all time by the Western Writers of America read The Wolf and the Buffalo. Though every word of the dozens of books he authored are saturated in the authenticity of the Texas cattleman that Kelton was, this novel holds a special place in my heart.
Published in 1980 before there was a widespread appreciation for the achievements of the Buffalo Soldiers against great odds, Kelton presents fully-realized portraits of the formerly enslaved men tasked with protecting white settlers.
All Kelton’s writing is alive with the language of the frontier. I am grateful to the master for helping me feel the rhythm of 19th Century, Western speech. On just one page, Kelton has his characters speak of fires that they “get to goin’,” of someone departing rapidly “skinning out the door,” and of how, if a character were younger he’d “like as not” answer the call of adventure.
From the author of "The Far Canyon" and "The Good Old Boys" comes this poignant story of a freed slave who goes west with the army and confronts much more than the hostilities of the Comanche and Kiowa.
The Civil War has ended and Gideon Ledbetter is feed from slavery. Like many, he has no land, no money, and no means to make a living. Gideon is drawn into the army by a recruiter who paints an alluring picture of cavalry life out in the west. The Indians called the black men "Buffalo" soldiers, as their tightly twisted hair reminded…
Daughter of a Daughter of a Queen is an epic
page-turner inspired by the true story of Cathay/Cathy Williams, the only woman
known to have served with the legendary Buffalo Soldiers and the first to
enlist in the peacetime U.S. military. Born into slavery, freed by the Civil
War, Cathy refused the cruel future that awaited all women-- especially an unmarried,
uneducated, Black woman like herself--in the defeated South. Instead, she made
the majestic decision to disguise herself as a man and ride west toward grand
adventure and true freedom with the Buffalo Soldiers.
Nature writer Sharman Apt Russell tells stories of her experiences tracking wildlife—mostly mammals, from mountain lions to pocket mice—near her home in New Mexico, with lessons that hold true across North America. She guides readers through the basics of identifying tracks and signs, revealing a landscape filled with the marks left by browsing deer, predatory weasels, and inquisitive bears, skunks, and raccoons. Master tracker Kim A Cabrera provides photos and illustrations.
Winner of the prestigious John Burroughs Medal, Russell also writes about community, a sense of place, and a renewed connection with the nonhuman world. She explores the health of…
What Walks This Way: Discovering the Wildlife Around Us Through Their Tracks and Signs
Did a red fox pass this way? Could that be a bobcat print there in the dirt? Do those tracks belong to a domestic dog or a coyote? Combining lyrical memoir with an introduction to wildlife tracking, What Walks This Way explores the joys of learning to recognize the traces of the creatures with whom we share our world.
The nature writer Sharman Apt Russell tells stories of her experiences tracking wildlife-mostly mammals, from mountain lions to pocket mice-near her home in New Mexico, with lessons that hold true across North America. With wit and compassion, she guides readers through…
