Book Review

More than three decades after Charles Kenner's definitive Texas Tech doctoral thesis on the Comanchero trade, he continues to hold his own as a skillful interpreter of historical fact and irony. His latest work, Buffalo Soldiers and Officers of the Ninth Cavalry, 1867–1898: Black & White Together introduces the subject of the professional and personal relationships between officers and the men they commanded. Many references to the attitudes and personal feelings that officers and men held for each other abound within existing diaries and letters, post returns, and newspaper accounts. There is no shortage of this material. Kenner has masterfully congealed this primary information into a finely-tuned narrative that addresses the issue head-on in a scholarly and coherent form. It is a study long overdue.

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Kenner's book is an insightful examination into the efforts of the individual soldier (both officer and enlisted man) to perform his duties within an often restrictive and provincial command structure. Incidents of trust and genuine regard counterbalance those of aloofness and outright discrimination. Kenner shares with the reader many examples of both. On one hand, no commanding officer could have been more dedicated to his men then Col. Edward Hatch of the Ninth Cavalry, and his Tenth Cavalry counterpart Col. Benjamin Grierson. Their subordinate officers, however, were a mixed bag of personable and dedicated men, like Lt. Patrick Cusack, who cited three members of his Company C for gallantry after an action with Lipan Apaches some forty miles south of Fort Davis in 1868, and Maj. Albert Morrow, who paid homage to the black soldiers, noting their tenacity, bravery, and endurance on campaign duty.

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