Channeling Buffalo Soldiers: National Parks Seek to Draw More Black Visitors

By Sara Bernard

Yosemite National Park ranger Shelton Johnson has spent a lot of time thinking about the Buffalo Soldiers — African-American Army troops who were stationed in the Sierras in the first years of the 20th century. In fact, it's been 18 years since he graduated from Yosemite's Mounted Horse Patrol School for the express purpose of portraying them in films, podcasts and live performances. Mostly, he plays Sgt. Elizy Bowman — Troop “K,” 9th U.S. Cavalry — who was one of the real-life Buffalo Soldiers who found duty in the high country.

"What that job meant was patrolling Yosemite," Shelton's character croons, on one of the episodes of the podcast. "And the way of Yosemite is that there are colored soldiers here and we are the ones enforcing the rules."

That's because the Buffalo Soldiers were some of the country’s first national park rangers —before the National Park Service was created in 1916.  The second African-American National Parks Event will honor their legacy with speeches, re-enactments and a performance by Shelton Johnson in Yosemite Valley.

Participants will first gather at San Francisco's old Army base, the Presidio, where the Buffalo Soldiers were once stationed, and then travel by bus along the route that some took into the Sierra Nevada in 1903. They'll stop in Los Banos, where one prominent Buffalo Soldier is buried, and then spend the night camping in Yosemite, trailed by the Buffalo Soldiers Motorcycle Club.

The event focuses on African-American history in the national parks to spotlight today's reality: few African-Americans visit them. A study several years ago found that at Yosemite, the proportion of black visitors is less than 1 percent.

"A lot of people feel uncomfortable being the only one," said Teresa Baker, event founder and community leader for Outdoor Afro, a Berkeley-based social network. Its goal is to get more African-Americans outdoors nationwide.

"I think that the more we see ourselves out in these spaces, the more comfortable we will become with that," Baker said.

Outdoor Afro founder Rue Mapp calls it the “anti-program program,” because eventually, she says, this kind of work won’t be necessary.

"What we're really working toward is that moment when it will just be ordinary," she said. "That people are accessing these places and spaces in a way that fits into their lives and it's not a banner headline. It is just a way of life."

Ranger Kelli English, chief of interpretation for four National Park sites in the Bay Area, concedes the "perception is out there that African-Americans don't go to national parks, that African-Americans don't explore the outdoors, they don't go hiking, they don't go camping," but she wants to prove that stereotype wrong.

For many participants and event organizers, the history of the Buffalo Soldiers dispels the perception that black Americans aren’t engaged with the outdoors. The troops built the first trail to the top of Mount Whitney. They built the first botanical garden in a national park, in Yosemite. They stopped wildlife poaching and timber theft and fought wildfires.

"One can argue that without the contributions that the Buffalo Soldiers made to our national parks in California that we might not have the National Park Service as we know it today," English said.

Still, it wasn’t easy. While many Buffalo Soldiers were veterans of overseas wars — the Spanish-American War and the Philippine-American War for the most part — they never came to be seen as capable and worthy in the white-dominated society back home.

"It’s amazing when you think about Colonel Charles Young serving as superintendent of Sequoia National Park for the summer" of 1903, English said, "and really going head-to-head with local ranchers who didn’t think a black man should be telling them what they could or couldn’t do with their livestock. The challenges that they faced a hundred years ago trying to protect these national parks were really quite astounding."

Oakland resident C.B. Smith-Dahl agrees. She and her family will join this weekend’s trip to Yosemite, and she feels the history they’ll encounter is important for all Americans.

"Just like it’s important for my kids to know that there are people who look like them who were more than just slaves, it’s also important for kids who don’t look like them to know that there is this range of black experience in the United States."

And as Shelton Johnson says — through his alter ego Elizy Bowman — that experience has been both difficult and rewarding.

"Every time I hear those words, Buffalo Soldier, I think about what they mean. I think about the past. I think about who I am," Bowman says in the podcast. "It’s a difficult duty. It’s a hard duty. But it’s a hard job in a beautiful place."