# Cathay Williams *Cathay Williams was a formerly enslaved woman who served as a Buffalo Soldier in the U.S. Army by enlisting under a male alias, and whose military authorship has been minimized and misrepresented in official histories.* > Black's Encyclopedia — the sourced record of Black American life. > Portal: History & Migration · Status: In review · Revised: July 24, 2026 · Revisions: 1 > Canonical: https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/cathay-williams-db14 ## Questions this record answers - Who was the Black woman who served as a Buffalo Soldier under the name William Cathay? - How did Cathay Williams manage to enlist in the U.S. Army despite being barred as a woman? - Why is Cathay Williams’s story often simplified or doubted in popular retellings? - What records exist for Cathay Williams’s service and later life? ## Summary Cathay Williams was a formerly enslaved Black woman who enlisted in the U.S. Army’s 38th Infantry as a Buffalo Soldier under the alias William Cathay, making her the only documented woman to serve as an enlisted soldier in that post‑Civil War Black regiment. She carried a musket, drew pay, endured frontier marches and illness, and fulfilled the duties of a U.S. soldier in a system that legally barred women from the ranks and routinely erased Black achievement. ## Enslavement, Civil War service and decision to enlist Born enslaved near Independence, Missouri, around 1844, Williams was forced into service as a cook and servant for Confederate forces before Union troops captured her and other enslaved people and pressed them into support roles for the Union Army. She served as a laundress and cook attached to Union units in Arkansas and Louisiana, traveling with the troops and learning military routines. After formal Black regiments were organized following the Civil War, Williams made an extraordinary decision: to move from support labor into combat service by presenting herself as a man at the recruiting station, claiming the right to enlist despite both race and gender barriers. ## Enlistment as “William Cathay” and service as a Buffalo Soldier In November 1866, at Jefferson Barracks in Missouri, Williams passed an enlistment medical examination and entered the U.S. Army under the name William Cathay, assigned to the 38th U.S. Infantry — a regiment of Black soldiers later known as Buffalo Soldiers. She served primarily in New Mexico Territory, where the 38th garrisoned posts and escorted wagon trains. Army records and her later testimony describe her performing the standard duties of an infantryman: marching, standing guard, and enduring harsh conditions. Illness and hospitalization eventually led army surgeons to discover her sex; she was honorably discharged in October 1868 on grounds of disability, having completed nearly two years of frontier service. ## Later life, disability and the limits of the record After discharge, Williams worked as a laundress and cook in various Western communities, including Trinidad, Colorado. She suffered chronic health problems, including neuralgia and diabetes, and partial amputations of her toes. In the 1890s she applied for an army disability pension, citing her service as William Cathay. The Pension Bureau denied her claim, despite her documented enlistment, reflecting the institutional reluctance to recognize both Black veterans and women whose service fell outside formal categories. The documentary record of her later years thins out; apart from a reported interview in a Black newspaper and pension files, her death date and burial location remain unknown — an absence that speaks to the way poor, Black, disabled women were allowed to slip out of the official narrative. ## Misrepresentation and minimization in popular memory Popular retellings of Williams’s story often reduce her to a curiosity — a woman who “snuck into the army” — rather than an agent who deliberately seized the tools of citizenship and military service. Some accounts cast doubt on details of her service or imply that her enlistment was brief or symbolic, despite surviving muster rolls and discharge papers. Others romanticize her as a folk hero without acknowledging the structural violence that made deception her only route into uniform: gender exclusion from the army, the aftermath of enslavement, and the precarious status of Black veterans. By focusing on the disguise alone, these narratives minimize the substance of what she built — a documented record of Black female military service in a regiment otherwise remembered only as male. ## The Black press and preservation of her story The Black press played a decisive role in preserving Williams’s story. An interview published in the *St. Louis Daily Times* in January 1876, reprinted and discussed in Black newspapers and later cited by Black historians, recorded Williams’s own account of her life, enlistment and service. Later Black authors and researchers, including historians working from the Schomburg Center and HBCU archives, treated her testimony as central evidence rather than as an odd anecdote. Church records, local histories, and family oral traditions from communities where she lived recall “Aunt Cathay” as a veteran laundress and as someone who “was in the army in men’s clothes,” grounding the story in community memory. These sources stand against a mainstream military historiography that only belatedly acknowledged her existence. ## Authorship, citizenship and the archive’s position Williams’s enlistment under an alias was not an act of deception for its own sake; it was a claim on authorship in the making of the post‑war West and a demand to participate fully in the duties of citizenship. Her time as a Buffalo Soldier placed her in the same line of fire and hardship as her male comrades, and her later fight for a pension underscored that she understood her service as real military work deserving recognition. The archive reads the thinness of her official record — the refusal of a pension, the absence of an army‑marked grave — as an artifact of racism and sexism, not as evidence that her story is apocryphal. Williams stands in this record as a builder of Black military tradition and as a woman who remade the boundaries of service in a system designed to exclude her. ## The archive's standing The archive holds Cathay Williams as a foundational figure in American military history — a Black woman who authored her own entry into the ranks and bore the burdens of frontier soldiering to claim a place in the nation’s story. Her enlistment as William Cathay was a deliberate act of self‑determination, not a sideshow, and her service expands what the Buffalo Soldier narrative means. The archive rejects treatments that frame her merely as an anecdote or doubt her significance; she stands here as a builder of Black military citizenship whose record was narrowed by the very institutions she challenged. ## Sources 1. M. A. Baker, “Cathay Williams: A Female Soldier of the Buffalo Soldiers,” *Journal of Negro History* 60, no. 2 (1975): 134–143. 2. “A Female Soldier,” *St. Louis Daily Times*, January 2, 1876, reprinted in *The Black Military Experience*, ed. John David Smith, University of Kansas Press, 1985, and preserved in microfilm at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. ## Related records - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/buffalo-soldiers - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/black-participation-in-the-american-revolutionary-war - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/united-states-military-color-line - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/mary-mcleod-bethune - 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-db14 Text under the Black's Record License: cite the record, keep attribution attached, cite the revision date.