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.
The Road to Fort Washakie
One of my family’s most treasured heirlooms is a scrapbook containing photos taken between 1895 and 1897 at Fort Washakie, Wyoming. At that time, my great-great-grandfather John S. Loud was stationed there as an officer of the 9th Cavalry, one of the segregated Black cavalry regiments often called the Buffalo Soldiers. His wife, Kate Mifflin Loud, his son, James (Jim) Loud, age 19, and his daughter, my great-grandmother Dorothy (Dollie) Loud, age 16, lived at the fort with him, as they had at his previous posts on the western frontier.
Every Family Has a Maverick, Part 1
Every family has a maverick (or two), and one of my family’s mavericks was my great-great-great-grandfather Walter White Collins. Walter was born in Guernsey County, Ohio, in 1838 and moved with his family to Lineville in south central Iowa around 1855. In 1857, Walter, then 19 years old, married Elizabeth Paul, and settled on a small farm next to those owned by his father and two older brothers. He and Elizabeth had two children over the next few years, and had it not been for the Civil War, that might well have been the end of his story.
Down the Ohio River
In July 2017, my parents and I went on a cruise down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh to St. Louis, near where the Ohio meets the Mississippi…What I didn't realize was that, in making this journey from Pittsburgh down the Ohio River, I was actually replicating—although in a considerably different style—a trip made by the family of my five times great-grandfather, Thomas Longley.