In 1866, Cathay Williams enlisted as a man and became the only documented woman Buffalo Soldier.
This is the next installment of Courage and Consequence — a series about relatively unknown individuals in history who made courageous decisions under extraordinary pressure, and had to live with what followed. Cathay Williams needs to be remembered.
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On November 15, 1866, a tall recruit stood in a St. Louis recruiting office and gave the name William Cathay. The recruiter wrote it down as Cathey, looked the recruit over, and marked the enlistment papers: cook, twenty-two years old, five feet nine. 
He did not write down what the surgeon’s cursory examination failed to find. The recruit was a woman.
Her name was Cathay Williams. She had reversed it to make the alias, the way a person reverses a coat to wear it inside out. For the next two years she would carry a musket, stand guard, and march across the Southwest as a private in the 38th U.S. Infantry. She would become the only documented woman to serve as a Buffalo Soldier, and one of the few in the whole of the nineteenth-century Regular Army whose secret held.
She was born around 1844 near Independence, Missouri. Her father was a free man. Her mother was enslaved, and under the law of the place the child took the mother’s condition. So Cathay Williams was born a slave. She grew up a house girl on the Johnson plantation outside Jefferson City, and she did not even know how to cook, because cooking was not the work they had given her.
The war reached her in 1861. Union soldiers occupied Jefferson City and took the enslaved people as contraband, and the contraband were put to work. They made her a cook and a washerwoman. She followed the Army for the rest of the war — Little Rock, New Orleans, Shreveport, Savannah. When Philip Sheridan rode through the Shenandoah Valley, she washed and cooked for his staff. She was seventeen when it started. By the end she had spent the better part of five years inside the Army without ever being permitted to be a soldier in it.
In July 1866 Congress passed an act that reshaped the peacetime Army. It authorized six regiments of Black soldiers — two of cavalry, four of infantry — the units the Plains tribes would name the Buffalo Soldiers. For a Black man with no land and no prospects, the Army offered pay, shelter, and a uniform that meant something. For a Black woman it offered nothing, because women could not enlist. The Army had no category for her. It would have none until 1948.
The work for a freedwoman in 1866 was the work she already knew: cooking and washing, dependent on the goodwill of whoever hired her. Williams wanted more than that. She wanted her own wages and her own roof. Later, when a reporter asked her why she had done it, she gave an answer with no poetry in it. “I wanted to make my own living,” she said, “and not be dependent on relations or friends.”
So she enlisted. She gave the false name, passed the examination that the era barely bothered to conduct, and was assigned to Company A of the 38th. Only two people in the regiment knew the truth — a cousin and a friend, both fellow soldiers. They never told. “They never ‘blowed’ on me,” she said. The regiment wore the Zouave uniform, and she wore it like the rest of them.
The decision was not a single moment of daring. It was a daily one. Every formation, every march, every night in a tent full of men was a decision to keep going. She drew smallpox early, the disease running through the ranks, and lay in a hospital across the river from St. Louis while it nearly killed her. When she recovered she rejoined her company in New Mexico Territory and kept marching.
And march they did. From Jefferson Barracks to Fort Riley, to Fort Harker, then five hundred miles down the Santa Fe Trail to Fort Union. On to Fort Cummings, out in the dry country near Cooke’s Spring, where the work was guard duty and waiting. Then Fort Bayard. The supplies were poor and the weapons were worse, the lot of Black soldiers at the far edge of the country. She carried her musket and did her duty and told no one.
What it cost her was her body. The marches and the heat and the aftermath of the smallpox wore her down. She was in and out of the post hospitals — neuralgia, rheumatism, pains she could not march through. By the summer of 1868 she had had enough. She wanted out, and she found the way out herself.
“I got tired and wanted to get off,” she said. “I played sick, complained of pains in my side, and rheumatism in my knees.” At Fort Bayard the post surgeon examined her, and in the examining he found what no surgeon had found in two years. He learned that Private William Cathay was a woman. On October 14, 1868, she was discharged on a surgeon’s certificate of disability. Her captain wrote that she had been feeble in body and mind and unfit for duty. The certificate said nothing about her sex. It only said she was weak, and that her weakness had come before her enlistment — a line that would cost her dearly later.
The men turned on her once they knew. “The men all wanted to get rid of me,” she said. “Some of them acted real bad to me.” She left the Army and went to Colorado and built a life out of the work that was left to her — cook, laundress, seamstress in Pueblo and Trinidad, where they called her Kate. In 1876 a reporter from the St. Louis Daily Times tracked down the rumor of a woman who had soldiered, and her story ran under the headline “She Fought Nobly.”
Then her health gave out for good. Around 1890 she spent the better part of two years in a hospital. By the time she came out she had nothing. In June 1891 she filed for a pension — the same pension any old soldier might claim, for deafness and rheumatism and pain she said she had earned in the service. The Pension Bureau sent a doctor. He recorded that she had lost all the toes on both feet and walked with a crutch. Then he ruled that no qualifying disability existed, and that anyway her discharge had said she was feeble before she ever enlisted. In February 1892 the claim was rejected.
Other women who had served the country in disguise had been granted pensions. Deborah Sampson got one for the Revolution. Cathay Williams got nothing. After the denial the record simply loses her. There is no death certificate, no grave, no stone. She is gone from the documents sometime after 1892, and no one wrote down where or when.
It is tempting to make her larger than she was, and some have tried. The honest account is smaller and harder. She was not a battlefield hero; her regiment saw little combat, and she said herself that she finally played sick to get out. 
What she did was plainer and in some ways braver than legend. She walked into an institution built to keep her out, and she stayed in it for two years, on bad food and worse weapons, at the far end of the country, carrying a secret that would have ended her the moment it slipped.
That her sex went undetected through five hospital stays is itself a kind of verdict on how little the Army looked at the Black soldiers it sent west. She was invisible twice over, and she used the invisibility. She asked for nothing but the chance to earn her own way, and when she had earned it the country that took her labor in the war and her service on the frontier decided she was owed nothing at all.
She wanted to make her own living and not depend on anyone. She did exactly that, for as long as her body let her, and she did it as a soldier when no law allowed it. The country forgot her on purpose. That is the consequence. The courage was hers, and it was real, and it asked permission from no one.
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Sources: Cathay Williams’s own account, as told to the St. Louis Daily Times, “She Fought Nobly” (January 2, 1876). Military service and pension records, National Archives (Record Group 94, Compiled Military Service Record of Private William Cathey, 38th U.S. Infantry; Record Group 15, Invalid Pension File). DeAnne Blanton, “Cathay Williams: Black Woman Soldier, 1866–1868,” Minerva (1992); National Park Service, Fort Union National Monument; New Mexico Historic Women Marker Program.
Next in this series: Charles Caldwell — the Mississippi militia captain who knew the Christmas toast was the signal, drank it anyway, and asked to die where they could see him.
Charles C. Jett is the author of the Courage and Consequence series. A Naval Academy graduate and former nuclear submarine officer, he writes on history, character, and the decisions that test them at criticalskillsblog.com and civicsage.com.
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