Remembering the 24th: Introduction
A Closer, but Incomplete, Look at the 24th Infantry in Montana 1902–1905
As I started piling through the clippings and military records of the 24th Infantry stationed at Missoula from 1902–1905, I ran into a familiar problem from my previous research of Black history in Missoula: photos were hard to come by. In fact, when it came to the 24th Infantry at Fort Missoula, I struggled to find ANY definitive pictures of them.
It wasn’t until I re-visited John Langellier’s piece “Buffalo Soldiers in Big Sky Country, 1888–1898” in the Autumn 2017 issue of Montana — The Magazine of Western History that I finally thought I’d found one. The picture, featured at the top of this article, had the caption: “Pictured here in 1902, soldiers on the Fort Missoula baseball team engaged in exhibition games with other squads from the area.”
The date, seemingly, clinched it. The 25th Infantry left Fort Missoula in 1898. It wasn’t until May of 1902 that the Fort was again home to a full company of Buffalo Soldiers when Company L arrived from Fort Skagway in Alasaka.*
I hurriedly checked with the Mansfield Library’s Archives and Special Collections to see if I could get a copy. I got a quick reply from an Archives Photo Specialist letting me know the picture was on the Montana Memory Project’s site. He ended the email by saying, “Please note, you refer to the 24th Infantry, this is a photo of the 25th Infantry.”
And, indeed, upon inspecting the photo, it was indexed under the “25th Infantry” category. Something had to be wrong — either the picture was NOT taken in 1902 or it was mis-categorized. I still don’t know the answer.
A great deal of information has been written about the 25th Infantry’s 10-year stay at Fort Missoula from 1888–1898 but very little when it comes to the 24th’s three-year presence. This disproportionate attention may be why the photo was categorized as 25th Infantry. I can attest to this ignorance personally. Until it came to my attention in Spring of 2021 that the 24th Infantry was stationed in Montana just after the turn of the century, I had thought ALL Black soldiers stationed at Fort Missoula were part of the 25th Infantry.
TRYING TO FILL SOME OF THE GAP
This speaks to the underlying purpose of this series — to highlight the history of the 24th Infantry in Missoula. For although their presence represents only a third of the time the 25th Infantry were stationed here, they were no less present and visible to the community. Furthermore, the 24th Infantry’s 3-year stint at Fort Missoula was a meaningful contributor to the significant jump in Missoula’s Black population captured by the census from 1900 to 1910.
And as I’ve discovered, there is much notable history to explore here. For one thing, Montana would likely not have been the home of the 24th Infantry if residents of St Paul-Minneapolis had not vociferously protested the War Department’s original plan to assign them at Fort Snelling. So unhappy were the Twin Cities community leaders at the prospect of Black soldiers stationed there that they convinced the War Department to change their original orders and re-assign the 24th to Montana.
But there’s much more — from an examination of the Philippine Wars (which most of the soldiers came from and went back to) to a look at the conflicting ways the newspaper reported on them and to the highly visible role they played in the community at graduation ceremonies, parades, funerals, and the Missoula County fair. There is also the story of Emmett Hawkins from Fort Missoula who in 1903 won an international marksmen competition in New Jersey, getting a special visit from President Roosevelt in recognition.
There are stories of violence and racial unrest to tell, as well — the killing in Havre of John Traylor, a Black private in the 24th Infantry, by Everett Walls, a trooper from the White 13th Cavalry, and a dust up in Missoula over the color line being drawn downtown eliciting the police to deputize 50 Missoula citizens and arm them with guns. And then there’s the story — as best as I’ll be able to tell it — of Lieutenant Robert Calvert of Company M, a White officer who was shot and killed by his Black Quartermaster Sergeant, William Taylor, in the Philippines just a year after both left Fort Missoula. Taylor was hung in front of his own men for the crime.
And while there were relatively few confrontations with Native people in the area, soldiers were called to the Flathead Reservation once in response to a seemingly over-hyped confrontation over grazing rights in November of 1903.
All From the White Gaze
It’s my hope that this series of articles can help fill in some of the gaps in our public memory of early Missoula, particularly as it pertains to Black citizens whether they were Fort Missoula soldiers or retired enlisted men who raised families in Missoula after their service had ended.
But while the subject of this series is the 24th Infantry, the protagonist in these articles is the greater White community and the social environment these Black soldiers found themselves in. Nearly all sources come from the lens of the White gaze — whether that’s newspaper accounts, census documents, or military records. An honest expression of how Black soldiers at the Fort felt about Missoula, their commanding officers, or the merits of their mandated tasks will not be found in this series. There will be some references to letters 24th Infantry soldiers wrote to the Black press regarding their opinions on the war in the Philippines but none of those can be confirmed as soldiers who later were stationed in Montana. So even as this series is an attempt to bring the history of Black soldiers at Fort Missoula (and Harrison and Assinniboine) to light, it is still very much an incomplete accounting as long as primary sources from their perspective is lacking.
Despite these omissions, we should be able to see how this period of time contributed to the significant Black population in Missoula in the early 20th Century. The question of why and how this history has eluded us so long is still unanswered. There’s a long way still to go before we can make sense of how a potentially vibrant Black presence in Missoula and the state in general — one whose seeds were clearly planted by 1910 — vanished as the century progressed.
*For a few months in 1900, a small portion of one Company of the 24th were stationed at Fort Missoula.
