Cathay Williams

Cathay Williams was a formerly enslaved Black woman who enlisted in the United States Army’s 38th Infantry in 1866 under the name "William Cathay" and served for nearly two years as a Buffalo Soldier, making her the first documented Black woman to serve in the regular U.S. Army in combat uniform. She marched, drilled, guarded posts and endured frontier conditions alongside Black male soldiers, authoring her own place in the military at a time when Army regulations barred women altogether. Her service shows that Black women were not merely camp followers or nurses on the frontier—they were willing and able to take up arms, and Williams forced the Army to confront that fact by inserting herself directly into the ranks.

1.From enslavement to military labor

Cathay Williams was born enslaved in Missouri around 1844 and was forced into service as a military cook and servant for Union officers during the Civil War after federal troops occupied Jefferson City. In that capacity she traveled with Union forces, including an assignment with General Philip Sheridan’s command, cooking, washing, and performing logistical tasks that kept the army moving. This wartime experience introduced her to military life and the possibilities of Army pay and rations, even as she remained legally enslaved until emancipation.

When the war ended, Williams found herself a free Black woman in a country offering few secure wages to people like her. She knew from direct experience that the Army, and particularly its new Black regiments, offered regular pay, rations and clothing. That knowledge shaped her decision to seek formal enlistment rather than remain on the margins as a camp follower.

2.Enlistment as "William Cathay" and service with the 38th Infantry

In November 1866, at Jefferson Barracks near St. Louis, Williams enlisted in the United States Army under the name "William Cathay" and was assigned to Company A of the 38th U.S. Infantry, one of the Black regiments informally known as Buffalo Soldiers. The enlistment surgeon conducted only a cursory examination and failed to detect that she was a woman, clearing her for service. For the next roughly two years, she carried out the duties of a private: marching to frontier posts, standing guard, drilling, and participating in the routine labor of garrison life.

Company records place her with the regiment as it moved to Fort Riley, Kansas, and then to posts in New Mexico, where Black troops were tasked with protecting settlers, guarding government property and confronting Native nations as part of the Army’s western expansion. In these roles Williams shouldered the same expectations and risks as her male counterparts. Her time in uniform was marked by illness—she suffered from smallpox and other ailments—but there is no evidence that she evaded duty or failed to conduct herself as a soldier.

3.Discharge, disability and later life

After repeated bouts of illness and hospitalization, an Army surgeon eventually conducted a more thorough examination and discovered that "William Cathay" was in fact a woman. In October 1868, the Army discharged her on grounds of disability, citing her health and her sex as incompatible with continued service under existing regulations. She received no pension at that time, and later efforts to secure disability benefits were denied on technical grounds, despite her documented service.

In the years that followed, Williams lived in Colorado and then New Mexico, working as a cook, laundress and domestic worker. Newspaper interviews conducted in the 1870s and 1880s with the St. Louis Daily Times and the Pueblo‑based press recorded her own account of her service, including details of enlistment, marches, illness, and discharge. These interviews, along with Army enlistment and discharge records, form the core of the documentary trail that establishes her as a soldier.

4.How her story has been misframed

Mainstream retellings have often treated Cathay Williams as a curiosity—"the woman who posed as a man"—or as a colorful footnote in Buffalo Soldier lore rather than as a central figure in the history of Black women’s military service. Some accounts emphasize the sensational aspects of her gender disguise or reduce her to a comic anecdote about Army incompetence. Others mention her briefly but fail to recognize that she is, so far as the record shows, the first Black woman to serve in the regular Army in combat uniform.

Black historians and community memory, by contrast, have long held Williams as evidence of Black women’s determination to claim full citizenship through service. In Black newspapers and veterans’ circles, her name appears alongside male Buffalo Soldiers as part of a shared story of frontier hardship and military professionalism. The archive follows this line, treating her as a soldier whose gendered act of passing was a tactical solution to unjust regulations, not a gimmick.

5.Williams in the broader arc of Black women’s military authorship

Cathay Williams’s service connects directly to later struggles by Black women to enter the military openly—as nurses, officers and combat troops—and to claim pensions and recognition commensurate with their labor. Her experience shows that Black women were ready to serve in uniform decades before the Army wrote them into its regulations; the barrier was policy, not capacity or will.

The fact that Williams’s own testimony sits at the heart of her record underscores another principle of this archive: we treat Black women’s words as evidence, not as stories to be confirmed only when the state agrees. Her enlistment, her march routes and her discharge appear in Army documents, but it is her voice in the newspaper interviews that fills in the motives, the daily work and the costs. The archive holds her as a primary author of her own military narrative, and as a standing rebuttal to any history that renders Black women invisible in the making of the United States Army.

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.

7.References