Fans pick 68 books like New Mexico's Buffalo Soldiers

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.

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.

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.

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,… show more.

I’m not usually a fan of political memoirs (I tend to be skeptical of the authors), but this one is an enlightening read in terms of understanding the sorts of structural and governmental prejudices that Hispanic people faced in the early twentieth century as exemplified by New Mexico’s long struggle to obtain statehood. Otero was from a prominent New Mexican family and was the governor of the territory from 1897 to 1906. New Mexico was acquired as part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in the aftermath of the Mexican-American war in 1848, but it didn’t become a state until 1912, due in part to the anti-Hispanic attitudes in Washington DC that Otero discusses in his book.

Matilda moves to the small New Mexico town of Goodnight after inheriting a house, a small newspaper, and two dogs. She learns just how odd the town is when she starts investigating the murder of a reporter. The town of Goodnight is pretty bizarre, but speaking as someone who lives in a small town in New Mexico, Goodnight is more believable than it might seem to an outsider. I prefer books where weirdness is something to celebrate, and here the characters embrace their crazy with enthusiastic joy. This story is part screwball comedy and part mystery, and both work.

Dealing with an addicted child or sibling is traumatic enough; when the addict is your parent, the person who is supposed to protect and support you, the fear and betrayal are ramped up to an unbearable level. One of the Boys captures this in all its harrowing detail. Two barely teenaged boys move with their father from Kansas to New Mexico, where the father’s descent into meth addiction obliterates any sense of responsibility, affection, and decency he might once have possessed. Narrated by the younger son, One of the Boys is more than a realistic depiction of addiction; it also shows how far children will go to gain or retain a parent’s love, which is what makes the story so devastating.

Old Cold Cannibal is a bit of an outlier in this list, as it doesn’t fully conform to the Douglas Adams/Terry Pratchett style of humor/narration or plotting. But it’s a unique book with an amazing voice. I have a soft spot for harsh 1800s white narrators whose doubling down on arrogance and (historically accurate) racism wrap around from being awful to weirdly and unsettlingly charming. Old Cold Cannibal delivers on that 100% and allows it to infuse some humor into what is otherwise a very dark and disturbing narrative that follows a journey across the pre-Civil War U.S. to find and slay a dragon. It’s a rough, but entertaining read.

This is a nonfiction book and typical of New Mexico, as there are whole chapters of its history nobody really knows about. The (probably) first white American woman to come into the territory was a Jewish woman who accompanied her merchant husband and brothers. Even more interesting, merchants and traders weren’t even the first Jewish people - “Crypto-Jews” who were fleeing the inquisition came to New Mexico long before it was part of the US and kept their identity secret to assimilate. This is depicted with a character in Alburquerque and that perfectly encapsulates one of the overriding things about New Mexico and its tales – a deep sense of connectedness, across people, across the land. 

One of my permanent, permanent favorites. Cather’s novel about a pair of French Catholic missionaries in 19th-century New Mexico is a lot of things: a portrait of a complex and life-giving friendship, a “loveship,” if I can borrow from Alice Munro.

It’s also an immersive historical treatment of Catholic proselytizing in the Southwest and a lyric poem about the beauty of that land. It’s smart about the rigors and consolations and the inevitable condescension of missionary work. It’s smart about everything. A perfect book.