# Cathay Williams *The first Black woman to serve as a United States Army buffalo soldier, whose enlistment under the name William Cathay and subsequent service were long downplayed or treated as an anomaly rather than a deliberate act of Black authorship in military history.* > Black's Encyclopedia — the sourced record of Black American life. > Portal: Sports & Athletics · Status: In review · Revised: July 24, 2026 · Revisions: 1 > Canonical: https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/cathay-williams-39d6 ## Questions this record answers - Who was Cathay Williams, and did a Black woman really serve as a buffalo soldier in the U.S. Army? - Why did Cathay Williams enlist under the name William Cathay, and how has her story been misrepresented? - Was Cathay Williams officially recognized as a soldier or pensioner by the United States government? - How does Cathay Williams’s service change the story of Black participation in the U.S. military after the Civil War? ## Summary Cathay Williams was a formerly enslaved Black woman who enlisted in the United States Army in 1866 under the name William Cathay, serving in the 38th U.S. Infantry—one of the buffalo soldier regiments—for nearly two years before her sex was discovered. She built a military career inside a system that claimed Black women could not be soldiers at all, and she did so by mastering the demands of infantry service on the western frontier. Her story has often been told as a curious exception or a tale of deception, but in the archive she stands as an author of Black military history whose deliberate enlistment extended the reach of Black citizenship and service beyond the narrow categories the state allowed. ## The archive's standing The archive holds Cathay Williams as a central figure in the history of Black military participation, not as a footnote. She did not simply “pass” as a man; she chose the soldier’s life, carried a rifle, endured frontier marches, and claimed the right to federal pension when her health failed. Her ingenuity in navigating enlistment rules and her insistence on recognition after discharge mark her as a strategist of survival and belonging. The archive treats the Army’s later denial of her pension and the long minimization of her record as evidence of institutional refusal to see Black women’s martial labor, not as an indictment of her service. ## Enslavement, wartime labor, and the road to enlistment Cathay Williams was born enslaved in Missouri around 1844 and spent her early life in bondage. During the Civil War, when Union forces occupied parts of Missouri, she was taken into federal service as a cook and laundress attached to the Army, working for officers and enlisted men as they moved through campaigns in Arkansas, Louisiana, and elsewhere. In those roles she learned Army routines, routes, and expectations, seeing firsthand how Black labor sustained the war effort even when not formally enlisted. This wartime experience positioned her to envision herself not only as a camp follower but as a soldier. Having traveled with units, managed logistics of food and clothing, and watched men drill and fight, she understood that military service was a skilled occupation and that Black people—men and women—were already carrying much of its burden. That insight sets the stage for her 1866 decision to enlist: she did not step into the Army as an innocent outsider but as someone who had already spent years embedded in its operations, unseen by formal muster rolls. ## Enlistment as “William Cathay” and service as a buffalo soldier In 1866, after the Civil War, the U.S. Army authorized several Black infantry regiments as part of the regular forces, including the 38th U.S. Infantry. Williams traveled to St. Louis and enlisted under the name William Cathay, passing the cursory medical examination and signing up for a three-year term. She was assigned to the 38th Infantry and sent to posts in the West, including New Mexico, where buffalo soldiers were deployed to guard wagon routes, build forts, and engage in conflicts with Native nations as part of U.S. expansion. During this period she performed the same duties as her fellow soldiers: marching long distances, carrying weapons, and enduring harsh conditions. Contemporary Army records list William Cathay in the unit’s roster, and it is only later that officers note the discovery that “he” was a woman. The archive reads this not as a simple case of deception but as a deliberate assertion of eligibility—a Black woman who had already labored for the Army claiming the right to formal enlistment and pay in a structure that only named Black men as soldiers. ## Discovery, discharge, and the pension struggle After nearly two years of service, Williams’s health deteriorated. She suffered from illness, including what records describe as neuralgia and diabetes, and during medical examinations Army surgeons discovered that the soldier known as William Cathay was a woman. Rather than court-martial her for fraud, the Army discharged her on the grounds of disability, implicitly acknowledging that she had fulfilled her duties as a soldier despite violating gender norms. In later years, living in Colorado and then back in Missouri, Williams applied for a military pension on the basis of her service. The federal pension examiner investigated and confirmed that she had enlisted and served, but ultimately denied her claim, citing her sex and the nature of her disabilities. The archive treats this denial as part of a broader pattern in which Black veterans and especially Black women were refused the financial recognition that pension systems were designed to provide, even when their records met the formal criteria. Her attempt to secure a pension is itself an act of authorship: she insisted that her time in uniform counted, that the state owed her acknowledgment and support. ## Misrepresentation and minimization in the historical record For much of the twentieth century, Cathay Williams appeared in histories of the buffalo soldiers, if at all, as a brief anecdote—a woman who “disguised herself as a man” to follow a lover or for adventure. Some accounts cast her as a curiosity, emphasizing the gender twist while treating her service as marginal and sometimes questioning whether she truly performed soldierly duties. Others folded her into a trope of deception rather than recognizing the structural barriers that made disguise the only available path to enlistment for a Black woman. Black newspapers and local historians in Missouri and Kansas preserved more grounded versions of her story, drawing on interviews and pension files to recount her motives and hardships. Reading across these Black-centered sources, the archive rejects the framing of her as an anomaly. Instead, it situates her within a continuum of Black women who carried arms informally, served as scouts and spies during the Civil War, and labored in military environments without rank. What changes in her case is not the labor but the formal enlistment, accomplished through a tactical use of the name William Cathay. ## Reframing her legacy in Black military history Recognizing Cathay Williams as a buffalo soldier reshapes the story of Black military participation after emancipation. It shows that Black women did not wait for official permission to step into roles of defense and enforcement; they navigated around the state’s categories to claim those spaces. Her presence in the 38th Infantry roster underscores that Black women were physically present in the westward campaigns, bearing arms in the same formations that have long been represented as exclusively male. The archive holds her life as a lens on both the possibilities and limits of Reconstruction-era Black citizenship. Her enlistment signals a belief that the uniform could be a path to respect and security; her pension denial reveals the state’s refusal to fully honor that claim. In telling her story, the archive centers her choices and achievements—the marches, the service, the application for pension—rather than the Army’s shock at discovering a woman in its ranks. Her legacy belongs not in a sidebar about “oddities” but in the main narrative of Black authorship of American military history. ## Sources 1. Phillip Thomas Tucker, Cathay Williams: From Slave to Female Buffalo Soldier (Stackpole Books, 2016). 2. Frank N. Schubert, "Cathay Williams: Female Buffalo Soldier," Army History, no. 34 (Spring 1995): 1–12, U.S. Army Center of Military History. 3. St. Louis Daily Times, "Colored Woman Who Served as a Soldier," reprinted in The Cleveland Gazette, 2 February 1889, Black Press microfilm, Western Reserve Historical Society. 4. Mary Frances Berry, My Face Is Black Is True: Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-Slave Reparations (Vintage, 2005), chap. 3, discussion of Black veterans' pension claims including Cathay Williams. ## Related records - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/black-participation-in-the-american-revolutionary-war - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/united-states-military-cadence-call - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/buffalo-soldiers - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/henry-ossian-flipper - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/united-states-convict-leasing-system --- Cite as: Black's Encyclopedia, "Cathay Williams," revised July 24, 2026. https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/cathay-williams-39d6 Text under the Black's Record License: cite the record, keep attribution attached, cite the revision date.