This Inglorious Indian War
On November 17, 1890, Major Guy V. Henry of the 9th Cavalry, commander of Ft. McKinney, Wyoming, received a telegram ordering him to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Two days later, Henry and D Troop of the 9th Cavalry, commanded by my great-great-grandfather Cpt. John S. Loud, set off on the roughly 300-mile journey to the lands of the Lakota people. The 9th Cavalry’s D Troop were not the only soldiers ordered to proceed to South Dakota at that time.
It Was a Most Thrilling Sight!
As I have written in a previous post, my great-grandmother Dorothy (Dollie) Loud grew up on cavalry posts across the western United States and, for high school, attended boarding school in Omaha, Nebraska. While Dollie was in Omaha during the mid-1890s, a particular highlight came when she and some of her school friends attended Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, most likely in 1896, when the show toured the Western states.
The Life of an Officer’s Wife
I’ve written before about my great-great grandmother Kate Mifflin Loud and her adventures as an army officer’s wife on the 19th century western frontier. We know quite a bit about what life was like for the wives of army officers in the west because there are many journals, compiled letters, and memoirs written by such women, some published in their lifetimes and others collected by modern scholars. Officers’ wives who wrote memoirs include Elizabeth Bacon Custer, wife of General George Armstrong Custer, and Ellen McGowan Biddle, wife of Colonel James A. Biddle, who was the commander of the 9th Cavalry at the time my great-great-grandparents were living at Fort Washakie, Wyoming.
The Buffalo Soldiers at Fort Washakie
I can’t remember when I first learned about the Buffalo Soldiers. As I discussed in my last post, my great-great-grandfather John S. Loud had a thirty-year career as an officer with the 9th Cavalry. I did an 8th grade history fair project on his wife, Kate Mifflin Loud, some of whose experiences I described in an earlier post. My parents even had a painting from artist Burl Washington’s Buffalo Soldier series hanging in their living room. Stories of the Buffalo Soldiers were always a part of my world. And those stories are something everyone should hear.