Two Years as a Man, a Lifetime as a Footnote

The Woman Who Buried Herself to Become a Soldier

Cathay Williams Wore a Man’s Name for Two Years So She Could Choose Her Own Life. Then America Erased Even That.

Cathay Williams, a black woman, disguised herself as a man to join the Buffalo Soldiers

Non Members Read Here

Cathay Williams was born into bondage in September 1844, in Independence, Missouri, the daughter of a free Black man and an enslaved woman, according to the National Park Service’s official profile of her life.

Under the law of the time, a child’s status followed the mother, so despite her father’s freedom, Cathay belonged to someone else from the moment she drew breath. She grew up working as a house servant on the Johnson plantation outside Jefferson City, a large and prosperous holding whose owner, William Johnson, controlled every hour of her days.

That control broke apart in 1861, when Union troops occupied Jefferson City in the war’s opening months. Soldiers swept through the region seizing enslaved people not to free them outright but to reclassify them, in the Army’s own cold bureaucratic language, as contraband of war, a status the Wounded Warrior Project’s account of her life describes as her primary label before she ever chose a uniform for herself.

It was liberation with an asterisk. Cathay, seventeen years old, was pressed into service as a paid laundress and cook, attached to the 8th Indiana Volunteer Infantry Regiment under Colonel William Plummer Benton. She had no real choice in the matter. Her freedom arrived wearing a uniform, and it came with orders.

For the next several years she marched with the Union Army through Arkansas, Louisiana, and Georgia, doing the invisible labor that kept armies fed and clothed.

She was present at the Battle of Pea Ridge and the Red River Campaign, and later found herself reassigned to Washington, D.C., serving under the command of General Philip Sheridan.

She watched Sheridan’s forces cut through the Shenandoah Valley. She had, by the war’s end, seen more of the country and more of combat than most soldiers who actually carried a rifle, yet none of it counted as service. She was support. She was baggage. She was, on paper, nobody.

When the war ended, Cathay was left with the same problem facing millions of newly freed Black Americans:

no land, no capital, no protection, and precious few paths to a stable living.

She had spent years watching Black men in Union blue and understood, better than almost anyone, what a soldier’s paycheck could mean.

The Army would not have her as a woman. So on November 15, 1866, in St. Louis, Cathay Williams flipped her own name into William Cathay, told the recruiting officer she was a twenty-two-year-old cook, and enlisted in the Regular Army for a three-year term, a moment USA Military Medals’ history of her enlistment describes as sealing her fate as the first documented Black woman to join the U.S. Army.

The deception required almost no effort at all. Medical examinations for new recruits in this period were cursory to the point of meaninglessness, and the surgeon who looked her over pronounced her fit for duty without ever discovering otherwise.

She stood five feet nine inches, unusually tall for a woman of her era, which likely helped the disguise hold. Only two people in her regiment ever knew the truth, a cousin and a friend who had enlisted alongside her and kept her secret for as long as she needed it kept.

In 1866, the U.S. Army formed the first African American regiments, known as the Buffalo Soldiers.

She was assigned to Company A of the newly formed 38th United States Infantry Regiment, one of the first all-Black regiments of the postwar Regular Army, the units that Native adversaries on the Plains would soon nickname Buffalo Soldiers.

Cathay Williams made history as the first documented Black woman to serve as a Buffalo Soldier in the U.S. Army, a story that has long been hidden from the spotlight. Born enslaved

Private William Cathay marched roughly five hundred miles down the Santa Fe Trail with the regiment, arriving at Fort Union, New Mexico, in the summer of 1867, according to the New Mexico Historic Women Marker Program’s detailed account of her deployment.

From there the company moved on to Fort Cummings, guarding miners and immigrant wagon trains from Apache raids in a stretch of desert that offered little mercy to anyone, disguised or not.

The disguise very nearly outlasted the desert. Not long after enlisting, Cathay contracted smallpox and was hospitalized, then rejoined her unit despite a body that had not fully recovered. Between the illness, the heat, and years of marching stacked on top of years of wartime labor before that, her health began to fail in ways she could no longer hide through repeated hospital visits.

A post surgeon finally examined her closely enough to discover what her comrades already knew. She was discharged from the Army on October 14, 1868, under a Surgeon’s Certificate of Disability, her commanding officer Captain Charles E. Clarke signing the order that ended, officially, William Cathay’s military career, as recorded in the Leavenworth, Kansas city government’s history of her service.

She had served honorably for nearly two full years.

What came after was not celebration. It was survival, the same survival she had been managing since childhood, now conducted in her own name again. She worked as a cook at Fort Union, then moved on to Pueblo, Colorado, taking whatever work a Black woman with no formal education could find on the frontier. She married at some point during these years, and the marriage collapsed badly when her husband stole her money and a team of horses. Cathay had him arrested. She would not be anyone’s mark twice.

She eventually settled in Trinidad, Colorado, working as a seamstress and, by some accounts, running a boarding house. It was here, in 1876, that her story nearly slipped into public record for the first time. A reporter from St. Louis had heard whispers that a Black woman had once served in the Regular Army disguised as a man, and he tracked her down for an interview.

Her account ran in the St. Louis Daily Times on January 2, 1876, one of the only times in her life that Cathay Williams got to narrate her own history in her own words, rather than have it narrated for her, or not at all, as detailed in the Wounded Warrior Project’s retelling of that interview.

Explaining her reasons for enlisting, she said plainly that she had wanted to make her own living and not depend on relations or friends. Of her time in uniform once her secret came out among the men, she was equally direct:

some of them, she said, had treated her badly once they learned the truth.

The interview did not change her material circumstances. She continued working, continued aging, continued absorbing the ordinary damages of a hard physical life with no safety net beneath it.

By the late 1880s her body was failing in earnest. She entered a hospital in Trinidad sometime in late 1889 or early 1890 and remained there for an extended stretch, though no surviving record explains exactly what illness kept her, a gap in the historical record that the National Association of Black Military Women’s account also acknowledges.

By the time she emerged, diabetes had cost her every toe on both feet, and she could no longer walk without a crutch.

In June 1891, indigent and disabled, Cathay Williams did something few women in her position could have imagined doing:

In June 1891, indigent and disabled, Cathay Williams filed for a federal military pension based on her own service, becoming perhaps only the fourth woman in American history to seek recognition for disguised military service, after Deborah Sampson, Anna Maria Lane, and Mary Hayes McCauley.

But where Sampson had allies like Paul Revere pressing her case, Cathay’s own attorneys mishandled her application, misreporting her disability as deafness rather than the amputations that had actually crippled her, a breakdown the Colorado Springs Gazette’s reporting lays out in detail.

On September 9, 1891, a doctor employed by the federal Pension Bureau examined her in Trinidad. He recorded her as forty-nine years old, five feet seven, stout, and unable to walk unaided.

He noted, accurately, that all her toes had been amputated from both feet. But he also declared, based on nothing more than a bedside conversation, that she was not deaf. This undermined the very grounds her attorneys had filed under.

He found no physical evidence of the neuralgia or rheumatism she had described. He seemed unaware that neuralgia is a disorder of the nerves, not the muscle and joint tissue he had gone looking o inspect.

Cathay Williams | United States | NABMW

The Civil War Rx blog’s analysis of her pension file reconstructs this examination in granular detail. Her claim was rejected. The country had accepted her body for two years of frontier military service. But the moment she asked for something back, it found her insufficiently disabled to deserve it.

What happened to Cathay Williams after that denial is, depending on which historical record is believed, either one of the quieter tragedies of the nineteenth century or a mystery that has only recently begun to unravel.

For well over a century, the standard account held that she died in obscurity shortly after her pension was rejected, sometime around 1892 or 1893, in poverty, without a headstone, without a death certificate, and without anyone bothering to record where she was buried.

Her simple grave marker, if she ever had one, would have been made of wood, and wood does not survive a century of Colorado winters. That is the version most encyclopedias and museum plaques still repeat.

But newer archival work complicates even that ending. A Colorado historian researching hospital and cemetery records has surfaced evidence suggesting Cathay Williams may not have died in the early 1890s at all. She may have lived another eighteen years beyond her rejected pension claim.

Under this account, Williams eventually entered an asylum under a diagnosis of chronic mania. The record’s details, including Civil War and Indian Wars service and the amputation of all her toes, line up too precisely with her documented history to belong to anyone else.

The Colorado Springs Gazette’s investigation into her final years details this account. Williams died in Pueblo in 1911, likely resting in an unmarked grave in the historic 1891 section of the city’s Rosemont Cemetery.

If that research holds, the woman American institutions spent a century describing as vanishing into an unmarked, undated death in 1893 in fact endured nearly two more decades of a life the record simply failed to keep. Either version of her ending makes the same point in different degrees. The country was far more careful about erasing Cathay Williams than it ever was about remembering her.

She left no diaries, no letters, no photographs that historians have been able to confirm as authentic. She was illiterate her entire life, so every word attributed to her passed first through someone else’s pen, the 1876 newspaper reporter’s most of all.

And yet she is, by every documented account, the only woman known to have served in the United States Army disguised as a man during the Indian Wars, and the only known woman among the Buffalo Soldiers.

Recognition arrived only generations late, and only in fragments.

Uncovering the truth about Cathay Williams, a formerly enslaved woman who served in the US Army

A bronze bust and rose garden were dedicated at the Richard Allen Cultural Center in Leavenworth, Kansas, in 2016. A monument bench was unveiled on the Walk of Honor at the National Infantry Museum in 2018. The National Association of Black Military Women’s history page records these milestones alongside the rest of her story.

The African American Museum of Southern Arizona’s exhibit, covered by KOLD News 13, continues to carry her story forward for new audiences.

A woman who once had to erase her own name to be allowed to serve now has her real one carved in bronze. That recognition came a century and a half after the country first refused to let her keep it while she was alive to use it.

If Cathay Williams’s story moved you, that’s exactly why it deserves your claps. She spent a lifetime being written out of the record by people who never bothered to get her story right the first time. Every clap tells the algorithm, and the next reader, that this is a name worth keeping.

Further Reading and Viewing

The National Park Service profile of Cathay Williams lays out the fullest official government account of her Army service and discharge, drawn from surviving military records.

The National Association of Black Military Women’s history page on Cathay Williams details her pension application and the medical examination that led to its denial.

Historian Phillip Thomas Tucker’s book length biography, Cathay Williams: From Slave to Female Buffalo Soldier, remains the most extensive single treatment of her life.

The Civil War Rx blog’s deep dive into her pension file walks through the specific medical and legal failures of her disability claim in granular detail.

The Colorado Springs Gazette’s investigative feature on Williams’s later years presents the newer archival research suggesting she may have lived until 1911 in Pueblo rather than dying in the early 1890s as long assumed.

The New Mexico Historic Women Marker Program’s biography covers her time serving in the New Mexico Territory with the 38th Infantry.

KOLD News 13’s coverage of the African American Museum of Southern Arizona’s Cathay Williams exhibit situates her story within a broader public history context.