Mark Matthews: One Of The Last Buffalo Soldiers
TwitterMark Matthews was one of the last surviving Buffalo Soldiers and only died in 2005.
Part of the allure and mystique of the Wild West was that it was fleeting. And Mark Matthews, one of the nation’s last surviving Buffalo Soldiers, was there to watch the sun come down on the American frontier.
Born in 1894, Matthews grew up in Ohio. According to the African American Registry, he met Buffalo Soldiers from the 10th Cavalry while working at a race track in Kentucky. Though Matthews was just 15, two years too young, he managed to enlist as a Buffalo Soldier himself shortly thereafter.
Matthews went first to Fort Huachuca, Arizona for training. “I learned all the different rules, how to ride the different horses, how to jump, and how to shoot,” he said, according to the Washington Post. “Every time I got in a contest where I shot at a target or something, I usually won.”
Library of CongressMembers of the Buffalo Soldiers, pictured in 1890.
In 1916, Matthews also participated in General John J. Pershing’s ongoing pursuit of the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa. “I never met him,” he would later recall, “but I knew where he was at.”
Though the days of the Wild West had ended, Mark Matthews continued to serve his country. In the 1930s, he helped train military recruits in horsemanship and even worked in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s stables. And when World War II broke out, Matthews saw action in the South Pacific.
Matthews died in 2005 at age 111 as one of the nation’s last surviving Buffalo Soldiers. By then, the Buffalo Soldiers had long since disbanded (they were integrated into other units in 1952) and the Wild West had become a tame labyrinth. But the heroic legacy of this all-Black Wild West unit lives on.
