Cathay Williams
In reviewCathay Williams was a formerly enslaved woman who enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1866 under the name "William Cathay" and served nearly two years in the 38th U.S. Infantry, making her the first documented Black woman to serve as a Buffalo Soldier. She built a military record at a time when both Black people and women were formally barred from that kind of service, using the only strategy the system left open to her: passing as a man in order to claim a soldier’s pay and status.
1.Enslavement, war, and early life
Cathay Williams was born into slavery around 1844, near Independence, Missouri, on a plantation owned by a wealthy local family. As a child and young woman she labored without pay, like hundreds of thousands of enslaved Black people whose work underwrote the antebellum economy of the border states. When Union forces occupied parts of Missouri during the Civil War, enslaved people associated with Confederate households were often pressed into service as military laborers.
Williams was among them. She was taken into Union Army service as a cook and laundress, moving with troops across Arkansas, Louisiana, and Georgia. In her later account to a reporter, she recalled working for General Philip Sheridan’s command, following the army through campaigns that pushed deep into Confederate territory. In those years she learned army routines, observed soldiers at close range, and saw that military service, even in its harshest forms, offered pay, rations, and a measure of status unavailable to Black women under civilian white control.
2.Enlistment as "William Cathay" and service in the 38th Infantry
After the Civil War, Congress authorized the creation of Black regular army regiments, later known collectively as Buffalo Soldiers. In 1866, at Jefferson Barracks near St. Louis, Missouri, Williams presented herself for enlistment not as a woman but as a man named "William Cathay." An army surgeon performed the required medical exam yet either failed to detect or declined to report her sex; she was accepted into Company A of the 38th U.S. Infantry.
Over the next roughly eighteen months, Williams marched and served alongside other Black soldiers, performing duties that included garrison work and western frontier assignments in New Mexico and the Plains. She participated in the daily regimen of drills, weapons practice, and fatigue details expected of enlisted men, subject to the same discipline and rations. Her service record shows repeated hospitalizations for illness, reflecting both the harsh conditions Black troops endured and the particular physical toll on a body that had already survived enslavement and wartime labor.
3.Discovery, discharge, and life after the army
Williams’s health deteriorated during her time with the 38th Infantry. After a series of hospital visits, an army surgeon finally documented that she was a woman, and in October 1868 she received an honorable discharge on the basis of disability. The discharge noted her enlistment under an alias and her sex, but the Army did not pursue charges; her service ended quietly, with no court‑martial or public scandal.
Following her discharge, Williams made her way through various western communities, including work as a cook and laundress in New Mexico and Colorado mining towns. A reporter from the St. Louis Daily Times interviewed her in 1875, publishing a rare first‑person account of her life in which she detailed her enlistment, service, and reasons for joining. In later years, she applied for a U.S. Army pension on the grounds of her service‑connected disabilities, but pension examiners denied her claim, citing both questions about her gender at enlistment and the statutes that did not contemplate women as eligible soldiers.
4.Erasure from, and recovery into, the Buffalo Soldier narrative
The popular twentieth‑century narrative of Buffalo Soldiers, in books, films, and monuments, often centers on Black male cavalrymen in the 9th and 10th Cavalry and infantrymen in the 24th and 25th Infantry. Within that story, Cathay Williams’s presence in the 38th Infantry sits awkwardly: she complicates the gendered image of the frontier soldier, exposes the army’s reliance on Black women’s labor, and challenges both military and civilian assumptions about who could be a soldier.
For decades, most standard military histories either omitted her entirely or relegated her to a brief anecdote, even though the documentary record—her enlistment and discharge papers, the 1875 newspaper interview, and her pension application—provide some of the clearest evidence of a woman serving in male guise in the postwar U.S. Army. Black newspapers and later Black women’s historians, by contrast, treated her as a pioneering figure, placing her alongside other women who defied gender restrictions to fight or work in military spaces.
In the late twentieth and early twenty‑first centuries, scholars of Black women’s history and public historians at sites interpreting Buffalo Soldier history began to incorporate her story more fully, drawing on archival records and reprints of the 1875 interview. Living history interpreters and exhibits at sites in Kansas, New Mexico, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture have since presented her as an integral part of Buffalo Soldier history rather than a curiosity.
5.Why her story is told inaccurately or minimized
Several forces combine to push Cathay Williams to the margins of the conventional story. Military bureaucracy and pension law were built on the assumption that soldiers were male, so when a woman appeared in the files, clerks treated her as an anomaly rather than a precedent. Later historians relying on official summaries replicated that blindness, passing over her service because it did not fit the categories the records expected.
Gender respectability politics also shaped which stories about Black heroism circulated widely. In an era when both the army and much of Black leadership promoted idealized images of soldierly manhood and domestic womanhood, a Black woman who had bound her body and lived as a man to enlist did not easily fit the available molds. By returning to the primary sources—her own words to the St. Louis Daily Times, her discharge documents, and her pension file—the archive refuses that discomfort as grounds for erasure. Instead, it holds her as a central example of Black women’s ingenuity and determination to claim roles from which they were formally excluded, inscribing her back into both Black and U.S. military history where she has always belonged.
The archive holds Cathay Williams as a singular figure in nineteenth‑century military and Black women’s history, an innovator in self‑presentation who crossed gender lines to seize opportunities that the law tried to deny her. Her service exposes both the dependence of the U.S. Army on Black labor in the aftermath of the Civil War and the erasure of Black women from the story of frontier soldiering. Later romanticized accounts of Buffalo Soldiers that omit her are not neutral gaps; they are active choices about whose courage counts as military history. Restoring her to the record reclaims Black women’s authorship in spaces where they were present but not meant to be seen.
The family archive is admissible here. Photographs, letters, deeds, church programs, funeral bulletins, business records, recordings — the things that were kept when no institution was keeping them. A keeper reviews everything before it is admitted, and your name stays on it.