AZ: The History of Arizona podcast · David Rookhuyzen

Episode 228: This Uniform Means the Same Thing a White Man's Does

·33 min·2 clips

In Bisbee, about 300 black enlisted men were attacked after being ordered to surrender their weapons.

1. AZ: The History of Arizona episode 228 centers on Buffalo soldiers at Fort Huachuca and the ways their service, leisure, and racism intersected. 2. Host David Rickhausen frames the story as a continuation of last week’s work on the 10th Cavalry and the Punitive Expedition. 3. The episode asks what daily life, recreation, and discrimination looked like for the 10th Cavalry and 25th Infantry in southern Arizona. 4. David Wark’s Winter 2005 Journal of Arizona History article is used to describe drills, target practice, practice marches, and plantings of shade trees. 5. The men also helped fight fires in the nearby Coronado Forest Reserve and attended NCO classes for an hour a day, five days a week. 6. The fort offered swimming, bowling, athletic competitions, a library, movies, YMCA activity, a Masonic lodge, and the Monday Night Club and Sunday Night Club. 7. Regimental bands became a major social link between the fort and nearby towns such as Douglas, Bisbee, Tombstone, and Nogales. 8. The 10th Cavalry observed July 28th as a unit holiday, and the 1920 celebration included a pageant, a barbecue, and a dance. 9. The 25th Infantry band played for a big Armistice Day ball in Nogales in 1926, and passport regulations were reportedly waived for the day. 10. The episode also notes a staff sergeant’s memory that John Philip Sousa called the 25th Infantry band one of the best in the army. 11. Baseball carried even more weight, because the 10th Cavalry and 25th Infantry played white teams and won public attention through their play. 12. The 25th Infantry Wreckers beat a Kansas City all-star team in November 1919 after Casey Stengel organized three games at Camp Little. 13. Stengel’s interest may have reached J. L. Wilkinson, who later helped build the Kansas City Monarchs. 14. The episode says several Wreckers later played together again in Kansas City, and that their baseball reputation lasted into the 1930s and 1940s. 15. Marriage rules created another layer of conflict, because a 1865 territorial law barred white people from marrying Black, mixed-race, Amerindian, or Asian people. 16. Santa Cruz County records for 1919 showed 398 marriage licenses, 250 of them to soldiers from Fort Huachuca, while more than 100 licenses were denied to brides identified as Hispanic. 17. The episode cites attempts to bypass those restrictions through Yaqui identity claims, including a July 1919 report of a girl from Nogales, Sonora using shoe polish to appear Yaqui. 18. Prostitution and drinking around White City also produced violence, including shootings in 1915, 1919, and 1920 and raids that pushed sex workers into nearby canyons. 19. The tone is conversational and heavily annotated, with David Rickhausen pausing for baseball history, legal context, and a closing reminder that the series has run out of time. 20. Listeners interested in Buffalo soldiers, Arizona border towns, and baseball history will get the most from it; listeners wanting a short, conflict-free overview may skip it.

As heard by us

A borderlands history lesson that moves from praise to prejudice without pretending the gap is neat.

The episode uses a chain of public praise for the 10th Cavalry and the 25th Infantry to show how Black soldiers in Arizona were seen when local officials paid attention: disciplined, reliable, and hard to fault.

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Why you'd press play

The borderlands, the ballfield, and the army all meet in one hard-edged Arizona story.

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