But Chace did. Sort of. He saw one man on Thirteenth Street coming from Elizabeth Street. He saw others, maybe fifteen, scatter, some coming closer to the hotel, presumably from the alley, but he did not say and was not asked to specifically state the direction these other men were coming from. It could have been from Elizabeth Street or from the alley on the way to Elizabeth Street. Chace saw the policeman riding the horse down Thirteenth Street as he passed his room window, and from Cowen Alley at the rear of the hotel he saw shooters fire at the horse and kill it.52
THE POLICEMAN WAS LIEUTENANT M. Yonacio (“Joe”) Dominguez. Fifty-seven years old at the time of the shooting, Dominguez was a native of Brownsville and on the police force for twenty or so years, the last twelve as a lieutenant. He occasionally was called upon to arrest soldiers from Fort Brown but never had trouble with the men of the Twenty-Fifth Infantry.
Just before midnight, Dominguez was at the police station at the center of town between Eleventh and Twelfth Streets. He was waiting for the school bell, which rang at midnight every night, and his meticulous recollection of the moment he heard the first shots—11:52 p.m. exactly—may have been because, with nothing else to do, he was staring at the clock waiting for the bell to ring. The firing came from “down near the garrison, on Washington Street.”53 (That would place it one block from Elizabeth Street and half a block from Cowen Alley.) Climbing onto his horse, Dominguez rode down Washington Street in the direction of the fort. Reaching Fourteenth Street, he came upon Genaro Padron, another policeman, who told him about the shooting at the Cowen house. Padron identified the shooters as colored soldiers and cautioned Dominguez to get out of the street. Dismounting in the intersection and moving close by the fence for cover, Dominguez tightened the strap holding the saddle to the horse and noticed four soldiers running up Cowen Alley, crossing Fourteenth Street in the direction of the Miller Hotel. Remounting, he raced back on Washington Street to Thirteenth Street and the Miller Hotel, where he turned left in the direction of Cowen Alley and Elizabeth Street. When he crossed the alley he heard (but did not see) the shooters walking in the alley toward Thirteenth Street. Once or twice he heard one of them say, “Give them hell!” Spurring his horse on, he rode past the hotel, yelling warnings to those inside. At Elizabeth Street, he turned his horse to the right, away from Fort Brown, and before completing the turn, he stood in his stirrups and turned his body to look back up Thirteenth Street in the direction of the alley. He saw between fifteen and twenty shooters coming out of the alley and turning down Thirteenth Street on both sides of the street.
It was then that he was wounded in the arm and the horse was killed. Pulling his leg from under the dead horse, he staggered down Elizabeth Street. Reaching its corner with Twelfth Street, he heard shots back on Cowen Alley, which put them near the back of two saloons.54 Brownsville had more than its share of bars, and the Ruby was one of three saloons close to each other on Elizabeth Street, with John Tillman's Ruby and H. H. Weller's saloon cheek by jowl on one side and Joe Crixell's right across the street. When the Twenty-Fifth Infantry arrived in Brownsville, its men learned they could not mix with whites and drink in these saloons. Crixell fudged his refusal by telling the soldiers he preferred the “officer trade,” and he figured enlisted men would prefer to do their drinking away from them.55 Weller was more direct and just said they were not welcome. Tillman, either because he was more accommodating or just a better businessman, set up a separate, segregated bar in the back of the Ruby for the soldiers. There was no business back there this night; it closed early when the soldiers were confined to base.
In the back of his saloon, Joe Crixell and his card-playing buddies were playing “pitch,” a game won by the player who came closest to his estimate at the beginning of the game of how many points he would win from the tricks he would take. Just before midnight they heard shooting. Crixell could tell it was gunfire but when one of the other players said it was nothing more than fireworks, the game continued. Immediately they heard another volley. Throwing their cards on the table, they jumped up to see what was happening. One player was worried enough about a bicycle he left outside to try to retrieve it. He changed his mind and scurried back in when a bullet hit the post the bike was leaning against. Crixell himself went to close the front door. Through the open door he saw people from Tillman's Ruby Saloon standing out on the sidewalk across the street. Though he had neither seen nor heard any of the shooters, he called out to them, “Close up your doors, boys, here come the niggers.”
WHEN DOMINGUEZ LATER HEARD that the shooters killed Frank Natus, the bartender at the Ruby, he figured it was from the shooting he heard as he reached the intersection of Twelfth and Elizabeth Streets. He was right.
The Ruby extended back to the alley, but about halfway back there was an open-air courtyard for its patrons. John Tillman was sitting there with three friends. Frank Natus was at the bar. At the sound of the gunfire, the men got up and went out onto the sidewalk on Elizabeth Street. They saw Joe Crixell across the street in his bar and heard his warning.56 Natus closed and barred the front door. While he did this, one of Tillman's friends, a jeweler named Nicolas Sanchez Alanis, needed to use the toilet at the rear of the saloon, which was close to Cowen Alley. While in there, he heard voices in the alley. Connecting these voices with the shooting, he stayed put in the bathroom.
Meanwhile, Natus remembered that the gate that opened onto the alley in the back was open. He rushed through the saloon to close and lock it. Alanis yelled to him, “Don't go out there; they are firing from the alley.” At that instant, Natus's hands flew up; he groaned “Oh, God,” and fell to the ground dead.57
FRED STARCK RENTED A house for his family on Washington Street one block west of Cowen Alley and half a block north of Thirteenth Street. On one side was a livery stable with the noise and smells commonly associated with such a business. At midnight on the night of the shooting, the Starck family was asleep. Shots fired at the Miller Hotel only a block and a half away awakened them. No sooner were they up when they heard the terrifying sounds of bullets tearing through the rooms of their home. One ripped into the ceiling above their bed. Mrs. Starck became frantic for the safety of the children, who slept on the same floor as their parents. At least two bullets were fired into the children's room. Mr. Starck then heard men walking or running back toward Thirteenth Street, that is, in the direction of Fort Brown.
DRAWN INTO THE TOWN, the two Combe brothers were running along Elizabeth Street in the direction of the shots that awakened Mayor Combe, he in the street while his brother kept to the sidewalk. After going a block, Dr. Joe heard shooting down Elizabeth Street and called to his brother to hug the wall for protection. Another block farther on, Mayor Combe banged his pistol on an iron lamp post as a signal to summon police, but there was no response. Half a block later, he struck a brickbat against an iron post, and a few minutes later Genaro Padron, who had warned Dominguez of the shooting at the Cowen house, appeared out of the darkness. The three of them continued together until Twelfth Street, where a dark stain under a street light caught Mayor Combe's attention. He identified it as blood (but did not yet know it was Dominguez's). He asked Dr. Joe to follow its trail to find who was hurt, while he and Padron continued on Elizabeth Street.
By the time he got to Crixell's saloon, on his right just past Twelfth Street, the shooting was over.58
THIS ACCOUNT OF THE shooting is not complete. There is more testimony damning to the soldiers. James P. McDonnel saw shooting from inside Fort Brown.59 So did Katie Leahy.60 Jose Martinez saw men climb over the wall out of the fort at the beginning of the shooting.61 The last time the Odin family saw what they claimed were soldiers, the men were moving quickly back to the fort. Katie Leahy, who lived across Fourteenth Street from the Cowens, saw the same thing.62 So did her boarder, Herbert Elkins.63 So did Ygnacio Garza, who lived with his wife across the alley from the Cowens, and whose home also was shot up by the shooters when the affray began.64 On the other hand, there wer
e witnesses who could not say they saw or heard soldiers. Some of statements were made under oath, others not. Not all were tested by cross-examination, and from those that were, wholly different inferences and conclusions could be drawn. There were so many investigations and statements and affidavits that over the course of the inquiries, many witnesses contradicted themselves, often in insignificant details, but occasionally largely modifying what they may have said earlier.
Nor is this narrative balanced. The imbalance is most pronounced when one considers there were many recollections of the details of the shooting by people in the town but very few by soldiers closed off inside the fort while the shooting took place.
From this narrative there emerges an understanding of the chronology and locations of the shooting itself and, even more significantly, why suspicion immediately, and some said logically, fell on the soldiers. And why it would be so difficult to convince people the soldiers had nothing to do with the shooting.
“To the men, not the least to be proud of is your record of good behavior in these Islands, proving your race is as law abiding as any in the world. I do not recall of the many places where the 25th Infantry has been stationed on these Islands that the inhabitants were not genuinely sorry when we had been ordered to leave their towns. For that matter, the same is true of your stations in the States.”
Colonel A. S. Burt,
commanding officer of the Twenty-Fifth Infantry
during the Philippine Insurrection
IN THE SPRING OF 1863, the New York Times reported that the nation was a step closer to forming army units made up of negroes (with the lowercase n) with the War Department's issue of General Orders No. 143: “Colored troops may be accepted by companies, to be afterward consolidated in battalions and regiments…. They will be designated ‘U.S. Colored Troops.’”1
Blacks had already been fighting and dying for the country without waiting for permission from the War Department. Every American schoolchild learns about Crispus Attucks, the son of an African man and a Nantucket Indian woman. He was working on the Boston docks in 1770 when the brewer Samuel Adams encouraged demonstrations against British soldiers protecting the customs house. Jittery troops opened fire, and Attucks fell, the first American to die for the nation's independence. Many more free blacks would go on to serve in revolutionary militias and the newly formed Continental Army. Black slaves also served and, after the Revolutionary War, their owners tried to get them back.
In the War of 1812, blacks again took up arms on behalf of their country, especially with the navy, where there was a serious shortage of sailors. One captain complained about having to command blacks, but a fellow white officer vouched for the sailors’ merits, and in battle, the captain found that “his black sailors performed so well that he wrote to the Secretary of the Navy, praising their courage.”2
In the Civil War, the famous—and later bloodied—Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry jumped the gun five months before General Orders No. 143.3 Of the two million soldiers who fought for the Union, 180,000 were black, and forty thousand of these were killed. Their bravery became legendary to those who witnessed it. Turn-of-the-twentieth-century journalist Oswald Garrison Villard would write of the Negro cavalrymen riding gloriously into Richmond: “[They] went in waving their sabres and crying to the negroes on the sidewalks, ‘We have come to set you free!’ American history has no more stirring moment.”4
AFTER THE CIVIL WAR, almost all army units—black and white—were disbanded and their soldiers mustered out of the army. In light of the lingering friction with Mexico, and because of the need for soldiers and army posts out in the American West and for federal troops to occupy the South during Reconstruction, on July 28, 1866, Congress enlarged the army and included four Negro infantry regiments. By 1906, there were two black cavalry regiments and two black infantry regiments, one the Twenty-Fifth.
Strictly speaking, the men of the Twenty-Fifth Infantry were not Buffalo Soldiers. Originally the term referred only to a cavalryman with the black Tenth Cavalry. According to the Buffalo Soldiers National Museum, “The most common explanation for the nickname goes back to the Indian Wars, when the Indians saw a similarity between the hair of the Negro soldier and the buffalo. Another account is that the nickname reflects the Indian's awe of the fierce fighting ability of the Tenth Cavalry.”5 It may have been both. According to some historians, in September 1867, Private John Randall of Troop G, Tenth Cavalry, was escorting civilians on a hunting trip in Kansas when, without warning, seventy Cheyenne attacked them. The Indians quickly killed the civilian hunters and shot Randall's horse out from under him. Shot in his shoulder and stabbed eleven times by Indian lances, Randall, using only his pistol, fought back with such ferocity that the Cheyenne warriors retreated. They told others of this black soldier, “who had fought like a cornered buffalo; who like a buffalo had suffered wound after wound, yet had not died; and who like a buffalo had a thick and shaggy mane of hair.”6 The soldiers of the Tenth Cavalry took to the name, seeing it as confirmation of their bravery and tenacity.
IT WAS THE CAVALRY, usually the white cavalry, that did most of the fighting in the American West. The infantry in the nineteenth century, white and black, served only marginally as soldiers, and its duties in the West were often unsoldierly. Most often the Twenty-Fifth Infantry guarded settlers, worked as laborers, and grew bored in garrison.7 The garrisons in which its soldiers lived could be worse than the backbreaking labor. In 1875, the regiment's commanding officer wrote about conditions at Fort Davis, Texas, after every rainfall: “everything saturated with rain, the dirt floor full four inches deep of mud, and the men sitting at meals while their heads and backs were being defiled with ooze from the dripping dirt roof.”8 In Texas was a hard place to be. The climate, characterized by Brigadier General E. O. C. Ord, commanding general of the Department of Texas, was “rigorous [with] the extremes of heat in summer and cold in winter,” and it was taking its toll. Referring “especially to the Tenth Cavalry and the colored troops,” Ord recommended in his annual report for 1878 that the troops be rotated to “take their turn for duty in the vicinity of civilization.” After much thought and discussion where this might be (including the question of whether Negro troops could adapt to a colder climate), in April 1880 the Twenty-Fifth Infantry was divided among three forts in Minnesota and the Dakota Territory. Only Fort Meade was any improvement over the previous posting in Texas, and that was because it also housed the Seventh Cavalry, back up to full strength after its annihilation at the Little Bighorn.9
After eight years in the Upper Great Plains, the regiment was ordered west to Montana, where again the regiment's units were divided among three forts, one appropriately enough named Fort Shaw to honor Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, the commanding officer of the Civil War's Negro Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Volunteers. At Fort Missoula, Montana, the regimental band was a superb group of musicians, and not only the soldiers thought so. Its Thursday evening concerts quickly became a part of the city's social and cultural life. No civic or patriotic event in Missoula would be complete without it.
But even the band could not compete for the soldiers’ affection with the regiment's beloved baseball team. Formed at Fort Missoula in 1894 by Master Sergeant Dalbert Green, the team was so popular that Colonel Andrew S. Burt, the regimental commander, made baseball teams a permanent part of the regiment to improve morale.10 Because players on the regiment's first team had to provide their own uniforms, the nine men taking the field wore a variety of caps and jerseys. A photo shows one natty player wearing what appears to be a necktie. By 1899, the team had real uniforms, each with a large block number “25” sewn on the left front side of the jersey.
These soldiers knew how to play ball. In the 1920s, Green reminisced about the 1903 tournament for the Department of Missouri championship. Lieutenant John N. Stratt had marched his team from Fort Niobrara, Nebraska, 254 miles to the tournament at Fort Riley, Kansas. He arranged for games along the route of the
march to enable the players on his newly formed squad to learn each other's skills, strengths, and weaknesses and to shape themselves into a winning team. Fort Niobrara won every one of these games.
At the tournament, it faced the other Twenty-Fifth Infantry team, Fort Reno, the cofavorite to win it all. Disregarding its fatigue from the march, Fort Niobrara, “to the surprise of the ‘sure thing’ betters,” won and advanced to the final game against the other favorite, the Tenth Cavalry. The championship game was a close one and went into extra innings, but the infantry brought home the winning run and defeated the cavalry 3–2.11
ON A LATE-SPRING morning in 1897, Missoulians showed their affection for the Twenty-Fifth Infantry when they turned out to cheer on twenty soldiers as they began—of all things—a bicycle ride. Lieutenant James A. Moss had finished last in his class at West Point (an “honor” entitling Moss to be remembered as “the Goat”). Few of his higher-ranking classmates had wanted to serve out in the remote West; fewer still wanted to command black soldiers.12 Moss the Goat wound up in Montana with the Twenty-Fifth Infantry and started thinking about military applications for the bicycle.
Moss figured bicycles were a good deal cheaper than horses to buy and maintain. They did not have to be fed, and this meant no feed costs and no land needed for grazing. They were smaller and less visible than horses. Bicycles never would attract attention by whinnying at inopportune times, so they were ideal for reconnaissance. Bikes could revolutionize how couriers got the message through. Moss was sure two-wheeled cycles could even transport most of the army's supplies, including food. He formally petitioned the army to permit him to form a bicycle corps to test his theories. Working its way through channels, his request came to General Nelson A. Miles, commanding general of the army.
Taking on Theodore Roosevelt Page 5
