Fort Garland in the San Luis Valley in Southern Colorado was the site of U.S. military border defense in the late 1800s. Today, Fort Garland is a museum, and it’s running an exhibit and a film exploring the history of Buffalo soldiers in the American West.
Museum officials and artists recently screened the film at Fort Lewis College in Durango to 50 community members. Eric Carpio is the director of the Fort Garland Museum. He speaks about the history of Buffalo soldiers during the film.
“This project aims to shine a light on African American contributions to the West, many Buffalo soldiers who were formerly enslaved before they joined the service. And so it's a story about freedom and aspiration and resilience, while also looking at that complexity and the role that they were often asked to play being on the frontlines of the removal of indigenous people,” said Carpio in the film.
After the Civil War, the United States hired recently freed black men to serve in cavalries across the American West to defend the country’s expanding border. One place Buffalo soldiers were stationed was Fort Garland in modern-day Colorado. As the U.S. annexed more states in the late 1800s, Buffalo soldiers were sometimes sent to remove Indigenous people from their lands, or protect white settlers from breaching tribes’ reservations.
“One of the roles that 9th Cavalry played in the [San Luis] Valley was not just keeping Ute members off of white land, but also keeping white settlers, miners, traders, and others off of the reservation as well, which adds another dynamic great to this complicated story,” said Eric Carpio.
Esther Belin is a Navajo woman and a professor at Fort Lewis College in Durango. She contributed original poetry to the exhibit at the Fort Garland Museum. She says in reckoning with the tough history of black soldiers and Indigenous people in Colorado, she felt grief.
“My approach to this project was through the research,” said Belin. “Realizing that I had a personal emotional connection, through the land, through the people through the recovery of stories. Part of it was to figure out, ‘What is my role in this narrative?’ ‘How can I honor these stories and kind of breathe life into them?’”
One Buffalo soldier named John Taylor moved to La Plata County after his service in the 1800s. He married a Ute woman named Kitty Cloud. Taylor worked as an interpreter with Ute, Navajo, and Hopi tribes. Taylor’s great-grandson, Johnny Taylor Valdez, helped with historical analysis at the Fort Garland exhibit. He says it’s important to address the erasure of Black people and Native people from history.
“The Utes were removed from that area and brought here. Our local people have the opportunity to come out and listen to the artist hear the story, and understand what's happened. And recognize that their story is still being told in their homeland, in their original place where they always will belong,” said Taylor Valdez.
