The life of Cathay Williams: The tale of the only female Buffalo Soldier, who went on to settle in Colorado

The story of Cathay Williams is written in scattered records.

Recognized as the only woman to serve in the Army as a Buffalo Soldier, her determination to serve and lead a life by her rules still fascinates historians today.

After settling in Colorado, Williams continued to live a life that intrigues us — and now, recent discoveries might help clear up the mystery surrounding Williams’ final years.

Military service

Born to an enslaved mother and free father, Williams grew up enslaved by a wealthy farmer in Missouri.

As a teenager, Williams was freed by Union troops during the Civil War. She stayed with the campaign that freed her and worked as a laundress.

“When the troops came and they were taken, she followed the officer that she was with all through his campaign. She was at the scene of many, many battles,” said John Bell, president and CEO of Buffalo Soldiers of the American West. “She was not in the Civil War as a soldier. She was in the Civil War just as part of being taken as contraband.”

Eventually, Williams was trained as a cook, and by the end of the war, was Union Gen. Philip Sheridan’s personal chef.

“They thought they were getting a cook. Turned out, she didn’t cook. So they sent her to school,” said Rebecca Atkinson, a Pueblo-based librarian and researcher who has been studying Williams’ story since 2007.

“She must have been a fast learner and so smart, because she not only mastered that, but by the time the Battle of the Shenandoah Valley was going on, she was the personal chef to General Sheridan,” Atkinson continued.

About a year after the Civil War, Congress approved the formation of all-Black military units. Williams decided to enlist in the Army that very same year, 1866, seeing an opportunity to support herself financially and head out West.

“Some friends of hers, other soldiers, sent her back to St. Louis because she was kind of stranded after the war,” Atkinson said. “She was living there and it was a simple matter to go over to Jefferson Barracks and sign up.”

Determined, Williams cut her hair, donned a masculine uniform and enlisted as a man: Williams Cathay. With lax physicals and high demand for soldiers, the 5-foot-9 22-year-old was cleared.

“Some people would say they would do 60 of these check-ups in an hour, or more, because they really would take anybody that looks physically fit, and she was,” Atkinson said.

After passing the initial physical, Williams was able to keep her identity a secret, with two confidants believed to be a cousin and a boyfriend, who concealed her secret.

“The regiment I joined wore the Zouave uniform and only two persons, a cousin and a particular friend, members of the regiment, knew that I was a woman,” Williams said in an interview for the St. Louis Daily Times in 1876. That interview is Williams’ only known documented telling of her story.

In fact, it’s in that interview where Williams’ talks about her motives for joining the Army.

“They were partly the cause of my joining the Army,” Williams said of her cousin and friend. “Another reason was I wanted to make my own living and not be dependent on relations or friends.”

“They became soldiers because that was the best job they could get,” Bell said. “When this new unit was created in 1866, it was part of the regular Army. So they got regular Army pay, regular Army meals, got a uniform, got a horse to ride for those in the calvary, and they thought it was great.”

Williams served in the 38th Infantry Regiment. As far as her accomplishments as a soldier, her military career was cut short by illness. By year two of her service. Williams had contracted smallpox twice, lost toes from frostbite, reported rheumatism and neuralgia, and like many soldiers, developed an itch likely from dirty clothes.

Williams also raised concern over deafness caused by her swimming across the Rio Grande in New Mexico.

While Williams carried out her duties and was considered a loyal soldier, her health deteriorated to a point where she could no longer serve. So, Williams went to the doctor who had cleared her several times before. There, she was found out as a woman and honorably discharged on account of her health.

“What really amazes me is how she could hide her identity for that long period of time,” Bell said.

Life in Colorado

After her honorable discharge, Williams worked as a cook for Fort Union, and then headed to Pueblo.

There during the 1870s, she married and opened her own laundry business. However, she left Pueblo after her husband, whose name is unknown, stole her valuables and took off, eventually being arrested.

After that, Williams moved to Trinidad to be closer to her mother, initially moving there as a man.

“I like this town. I know all the good people here, and I expect to get rich yet. I have not got my land warrant. I thought I would wait till the railroad came and then take my land near the depot,” Williams said of Trinidad in her interview with the St. Louis Daily Times.

With limited records and even scarcer first-person reporting, it’s unclear if Williams was transgender. Throughout different periods of Williams’ life, she identified as a man as well as a woman.

“I just try not to take sides. I’m not 100% certain if she was a woman or a man, I think she probably believed she was a man near the end,” Atkinson said. “But I don’t know if that’s true because the sources are so questionable.”

When joining the Army, Williams disguised herself as a man for practical reasons, and some historians speculate that she presented herself other times as a man because she was treated with more respect.

“I think it’s possible though, that at that point in time after being left to starve by the United States Army, the only time she ever got any respect was when she was a man,” Atkinson said.

“I would think that would make sense if you’re in a situation where it’s dangerous to be a lone woman perhaps you could pull it off.”

By the early 1890s, Williams was treated at a local Catholic hospital where she had to have the fronts of her feet amputated, likely from previous frostbite injuries. Unable to work, Williams applied for pension payments in 1891, but was denied after the paperwork attributed her disability to deafness and not the amputation.

“She hired some lawyers for her to put in a claim for pension, and those guys just got everything wrong,” Atkinson said. After being denied a pension, Williams became destitute — and that’s where historians part on her story. For a long time, some believed she died in 1893 at the hospital in Trinidad.

But recent discoveries by Atkinson tell a different story.

A breakthrough

Previously thought to be buried in Trinidad, Atkinson uncovered a handful of records that tell a different story — one that estimates Williams lived for another 18 years.

Atkinson first points to an article in 1893 by one of Williams’ friends that rallied for the community to help support Williams after being denied pensions.

But perhaps the biggest breakthroughs made by Atkinson comes from Woodcroft Sanitorium, a since-closed mental institution.

Found in the basement of the historic Vail Hotel by a custodian about a decade ago, the records were sent to the library Atkinson worked at.

Scribbled was the name “Kathryn Williams” written over the name “William Cathay.”

“It’s a one-page very short entry, it says that William Cathay, right age, Black man was put into that hospital in 1896, and then sent to the statehouse was in 1897, or ’98,” Atkinson said.

Williams’ diagnosis: chronic mania. The connection strengthened when the entry detailed that this person had been in the Civil War as a servant and then in the Indian Wars, and that this person had lost all toes on both feet.

“At that point, I knew that was our Cathay — how many people could be like that, and so I knew that was her,” Atkinson said.

Later, Atkinson found what nobody else had ever uncovered: news of Williams’ death in Pueblo in 1911. Atkinson believes Williams is buried in an unmarked grave in the “historic 1891 section” of Pueblo’s Rosemont Cemetery.

Legacy

Now, a painting of Williams donning the traditional blue Buffalo Soldier uniform hangs high in the Fort Garland Museum.

Her story is told again and again by Buffalo Soldier historians, who include her presence in reenactments.

And while we might never know her whole story, Williams’ embodiment of frontier independence and strength is true.

“The more that you find out about Cathay Williams, the more you want to know,” Bell said.