In 1903, Theodore Roosevelt was president, the mass production of automobiles was the new thing, and the Kitty Hawk made its famous first flight.
That same year, four companies of men from the 9th U.S. Cavalry rode for two weeks from San Francisco to Yosemite and Sequoia National Park.
Already veterans of the Indian Wars and the Spanish-American War, the soldiers were headed to their new assignment, protecting and developing the vast park lands that a dozen years earlier had been designated national treasures.
The cavalrymen had acquired vast experience fighting both with and against Native Americans, who referred to them as “Buffalo Soldiers”, reportedly because their hair reminded the Indians of the bison’s wooly coat. In the end, they would spend half a dozen years overseeing the parks, building trails, fighting forest fires and developing grazing land.
The Buffalo Soldiers’ role as early stewards of California’s national parks went undiscovered for nearly a century until recently, when U.S. Forest Ranger Shelton Johnson discovered a photograph of the troops in Yosemite taken some time in 1899.
That photograph was the beginning of a quest for Johnson, who would eventually be inspired to share his research with park visitors, the descendents of the Buffalo Soldiers and African Americans, in general—a group noticeably under-represented at most of the 388 national park.
Johnson’s outreach has taken the form of creating an alter ego, known as Elizy Boman, a character based on a real Buffalo Soldier of the same name as well as several of his fellow Black cavalrymen.
As Boman, Johnson interprets history for visitors to the park, students in California classrooms and interactively on his website.
“You, who are the soldiers, who are family, have given me that story,” Johnson writes on the website. “In so doing, you have assured yourself a presence in Yosemite. Thank you for clearing the trail that we follow 100 years later.”
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