Scouts

Contemporary efforts to reexamine the black role in the west ought to recall these complex dynamics of the frontier—not to view the period with the bad parts taken out, but rather with a cold eye on facts and an historian’s perspective on its dynamic place in the American story. The Black Seminole descendant and community historian William Warrior advises such an approach when he warns against viewing the scouts as heroes. It can be tempting to hold up both the Buffalo Soldiers and scouts as forgotten paragons of American virtue. In terms of the white society of their time, they surely were heroes, protecting citizens and property interests while serving as some of the most effective agents in the advance of manifest destiny. But the same society that the scouts protected would continue to disenfranchise them; if the scouts saw themselves primarily as maroons or black Indians, not African Americans, white society never made such distinctions. Meanwhile the scouts’ fleeting (largely uncelebrated) glory came at the expense of Native American lives and freedom. If the black warriors were heroes to white Texans, it was an ambiguous honor from the start.