The Buffalo Soldiers of the Tenth Cavalry:

How a Regiment Born of Emancipation Guarded Montana's Northern Frontier

Origins in the Wake of War

In the autumn of 1866, a year after Appomattox, the United States Congress moved to reorganize its peacetime army and, in doing so, made a decision that would shape the frontier West for the next three decades. Lawmakers authorized the creation of Black regiments within the Regular Army, among them a new cavalry unit to be raised at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The Tenth Cavalry was formed at Fort Leavenworth on September 21, 1866, under Colonel Benjamin Grierson, a white officer and Civil War veteran. Grierson, who had earned his reputation leading a daring six-hundred-mile raid through Mississippi during the war, brought exacting standards to the new command. He set very high standards of recruitment, and as a result, organizing the regiment took slightly over a year, with eight companies of enlisted men recruited from the Departments of Missouri, Arkansas, and the Platte by the end of July 1867.

The men who filled those ranks were, in the language of the era, freedmen and veterans of the United States Colored Troops, now offered a permanent place in the peacetime military at a time when few other institutions in American life would have them. That offer came bundled with humiliation. Grierson himself sought and received orders transferring his regiment away from Fort Leavenworth after its post commander made plain his opposition to Black troops serving in the Regular Army. The regiment relocated to Fort Riley, and from there began a career that would carry it across the length of the continent.

It was likely somewhere on the plains of Kansas or Texas, fighting Cheyenne, Comanche, or Kiowa opponents, that the regiment acquired the name history remembers it by. No one knows for certain why, but Native American fighters dubbed the Black cavalrymen of the Ninth and Tenth "buffalo soldiers," with theories ranging from the resemblance of their hair to a bison's coat to admiration for how fiercely they fought. Whatever its origin, the soldiers took the name as their own, and it endures today.

Two Decades on the Southern Plains

For its first twenty-five years, the Tenth Cavalry's story belonged to Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona rather than Montana. The regiment's mission in Texas was to protect mail and travel routes, control Indian movements, guard against Mexican revolutionaries and outlaws, and map the region's harsh terrain, work it carried out with considerable success. Troopers of the Tenth logged extraordinary distances in the saddle. They scouted more than 34,000 miles of uncharted ground, opened over 300 miles of new roads, and strung more than 200 miles of telegraph line, often while watching constantly for raids by Apache bands. In the late 1870s the regiment took part in the campaign against Victorio's Apache followers, and by the mid-1880s it was chasing Geronimo through the deserts of the Department of Arizona.

This service came at a cost paid disproportionately by Black soldiers within a segregated institution. The men of the Tenth were routinely given the worst mounts available in the cavalry, and because of their race, had virtually no path to becoming commissioned officers themselves. Command remained, with rare exception, a white officer's privilege; the discipline, the miles, and the casualties fell to Black enlisted men.

Northward to the Dakotas and Montana

By 1891, the regiment's long tour of the Southwest was drawing to a close. After twenty years of service in some of the least desirable posts in the region, the Tenth, now commanded by Colonel John K. Mizner, was transferred to the Department of Dakota. The Northern Plains, only fifteen years removed from the destruction of Custer's Seventh Cavalry at the Little Bighorn, still required a military presence, though the nature of that presence had shifted from open warfare toward surveillance, border control, and the policing of displaced peoples. Beginning in the late 1880s the Army's Black regiments deployed north into Dakota and Montana Territory, and over the following decade Forts Shaw, Maginnis, Custer, Keogh, Assinniboine, Harrison, and Missoula each became, for a time, home to Buffalo Soldier units.

For the Tenth Cavalry specifically, the move north began at Fort Custer on the Little Bighorn battlefield's doorstep. In 1892 the regiment's Black cavalry and infantry units were transferred from Fort Grant, Arizona, to Fort Custer in Montana under Mizner's command, with troops also stationed at Forts Keogh and Assinniboine in Montana and Fort Buford in Dakota. Fort Custer's tenure as a garrison, however, was ending. The first two companies of the Tenth Cavalry were assigned to Fort Assinniboine in 1892, and the whole regiment followed once Fort Custer closed.

Fort Assinniboine and the Milk River Country

Of all the Montana posts associated with the Buffalo Soldiers, none is more closely tied to the Tenth Cavalry than Fort Assinniboine, a sprawling installation in the Bear Paw Mountain foothills southwest of present-day Havre. Built beginning in 1879 in the anxious years following the Nez Perce War and the destruction of Custer's command, the fort had grown into an enormous complex by the time the Tenth arrived. Its mission, once the regiment settled in, was less about pitched battle than about the tense, day-to-day management of an international boundary and the peoples living along it. Cree and Métis bands, many displaced from Canada by the collapse of the 1885 North-West Rebellion, moved back and forth across the border in search of food and refuge, and it fell to the garrison to manage that traffic. The Riel Rebellion of 1885 sent refugee Cree Indians fleeing across the border into Montana out of fear of arrest or execution by Canadian authorities, and throughout 1887 and 1888 the fort's troops were called upon repeatedly to round up and relocate Cree bands back across the line.

The work assigned to the Tenth's troopers at Assinniboine was rarely glamorous. Typical duties included recovering lost mounts, scouting for Indians, burning abandoned shacks, and escorting displaced and often starving people back to the border, all set against a Milk River Valley that had itself become a contested battleground among the Blackfeet, Plains Cree, and Sioux. By the time the regiment was fully established, Fort Assinniboine had become the center of gravity for Black military life in Montana. The post became regimental headquarters for the Tenth Cavalry in 1896.

Lieutenant Pershing and the Politics of Command

It was at Fort Assinniboine that a young white officer destined for far greater fame first made his mark commanding Black troops. First Lieutenant John J. Pershing arrived in 1895 and was placed in charge of a company of Tenth Cavalry troops, where he earned a reputation for working effectively with the Buffalo Soldiers under his command. Pershing's tenure there was brief by later standards but consequential; the respect and discipline he associated with his Black troopers reportedly shaped the nickname later attached to him, and his service with the regiment followed him to Cuba.

Command at Assinniboine was not, however, solely the province of transient junior officers. Noncommissioned officers of the Tenth built long careers within the regiment's ranks even without access to commissions. Sergeant Horace W. Bivens, one of the Tenth's Black noncommissioned officers stationed at Fort Assinniboine, served more than thirty years and received thirty-two medals over his career, including a Silver Star for valor.

Cuba, the Philippines, and the End of the Montana Chapter

The regiment's Montana service, like that of the other Buffalo Soldier units in the territory, ended abruptly with the outbreak of war against Spain in 1898. The Spanish-American War marked a temporary close to the Buffalo Soldiers' deployment in the West, as all four Black regiments were posted to active combat duty, with the Tenth Cavalry becoming renowned for its charge up San Juan Hill alongside Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders. Pershing, recalled from a teaching post at West Point at his own request, rejoined his former command for the Cuban campaign. After the Cuban fighting, the regiments were sent to suppress guerrilla resistance in the Philippines, a controversial deployment that stretched on for years.

Few of the men who left Fort Assinniboine for Cuba in 1898 would return to garrison duty in Montana. The wars in Cuba and the Philippines left a lasting mark on Montana's Black communities, as many soldiers came home weary and unwell, chose not to reenlist, and settled permanently in the state rather than return to further active service. Fort Assinniboine itself never fully recovered its earlier prominence once the regiment departed, and the post was formally abandoned in 1911, its remaining buildings eventually given over to what is today Montana State University's agricultural research station.

Legacy on the Northern Plains

The Tenth Cavalry's years in Montana occupy a comparatively brief chapter in a regimental history that stretched from the Kansas plains to the Philippine jungles and, eventually, to a reconstituted, integrated force in the Cold War army. Yet the years at Fort Custer and Fort Assinniboine mattered. They placed Black soldiers at the center of one of the most sensitive diplomatic and law-enforcement problems on the northern border, the movement of displaced Cree and Métis people across an international line drawn without their consent, and they did so under officers who would go on to command American armies in a world war. The men themselves, denied promotion and issued the army's poorest horses, nonetheless built careers of genuine distinction, careers now preserved mostly in fort registers, historical markers, and the patient work of regional archives and preservation societies rather than in popular memory. Their story belongs as much to the history of Hill County and the Bear Paw Mountains as it does to San Juan Hill, and it deserves to be remembered on both fronts.

Works Cited

Fort Assinniboine Preservation Association. "History." Fort Assinniboine Preservation Association, fortassinniboine.org/about/. Accessed 6 July 2026.

"The Buffalo Soldiers at Fort Assinniboine." Historical Marker Database, www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=142745. Accessed 6 July 2026.

Montana State University, Northern Agricultural Research Center. "Fort Assinniboine." Montana State University, agresearch.montana.edu/narc/FortAssinniboine/index.html. Accessed 6 July 2026.

Montana Historical Society. "Military History." State Historic Preservation Office, Montana Historical Society, mhs.mt.gov/Shpo/AfricanAmericans/History/Military-History. Accessed 6 July 2026.

National Park Service. "Fort Leavenworth and the Establishment of the 10th Cavalry." U.S. Department of the Interior, www.nps.gov/articles/000/fort-leavenworth-and-the-establishment-of-the-10th-cavalry.htm. Accessed 6 July 2026.

"1st Squadron, 10th Cavalry Regiment 'Buffalo Soldiers.'" GlobalSecurity.org, www.globalsecurity.org/military/agency/army/1-10cav.htm. Accessed 6 July 2026.

"Buffalo Soldiers: Definition, Logo and Facts." HISTORY, A&E Television Networks, www.history.com/articles/buffalo-soldiers. Accessed 6 July 2026.