Scouts

The historical treatment of the Black Seminoles ran parallel to the experience of the Buffalo Soldiers, black members of the Ninth and Tenth U.S. Cavalries and Twenty-Fourth and Twenty-Fifth U.S. Infantries, with whom the scouts regularly served after 1875 and into the 1890s. The two groups mingled at Fort Duncan and then at Fort Clark, where the army moved most of the scouts by 1876. In many ways, the Black Seminoles were pioneers for the Buffalo Soldiers. They won the first effective U.S. emancipation of rebellious slaves, in 1838, which established military and legal precedents for the emancipation that black soldiers helped win through the Civil War. (Many of the first Buffalo Soldiers were Civil War veterans.) Out west the maroons shared knowledge of the frontier and, more practically, helped locate the enemy, ensuring the success of the black regiments.