Child of the Fighting Tenth: On the Frontier with the Buffalo Soldiers

by the late Forrestine C. Hooker, Steve Wilson (Editor)

This memoir by Forrestine Cooper Hooker details her childhood and young adulthood in the midst of the frontier cavalry. Hooker's father, Charles Cooper, was an officer in the Tenth U.S. Cavalry, one of two regiments with black troops, known as the Buffalo Soldiers, commanded by white officers.
Hooker's stories capture the drama of growing up in the frontier army, the Indian wars on the plains, the Geronimo campaign in the Southwest and Mexico, her love for the regiment and the Buffalo Soldiers, their admiration for her, and even her lost love for a dashing young cavalry officer. Her
narrative is by turns compelling, charming, humorous, and warm. As Laura Ingalls Wilder depicted farm life on the frontier, so Forrestine Cooper Hooker depicts army life.

Genres: Nonfiction

272 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Debbie Zapata · Rating 4 out of 5]

Forrestine C. Hooker was a writer of nine novels, the first of which was published when she was 52 years old. One of these novels was Prince Jan, St. Bernard. I read that one last year and it was the reason I ordered this book. The reason i chose to read it at this time is that the evening I was planning to finish the current book I had going, I happened to stumble across one of those glorious John Wayne cavalry movies from his John Ford days. So naturally when I went to my bookcase to pick The Next Book, this one sort of leaped out at me.

Editor Steve Wilson explains in his introduction that Hooker had written "a rough manuscript of several hundred pages when when she died on March 20, 1932, just twelve days past her sixty-fifth birthday".

This manuscript remained with her family and was never published. Wilson was researching the life of Henry O. Flipper (the first black officer of the Tenth Cavalry, and a man who served with Hooker's father Charles Cooper) when he learned about Hooker's memoir. He doesn't specify the details, but eventually he edited the manuscript for publication so here we are.

From her first days on Ship Island, when the entire population was lucky to survive a terrible storm, to the end of the Indian Wars, Hooker shares her memories of Army life. It is a personal history, so anyone expecting detailed information about the lives of the Buffalo Soldiers will most likely be disappointed. I would imagine that if the author had lived long enough to create a finished product she may have expanded some areas and cut others, but we will never know. The book needs to be judged as it is and for what it is. A look back to times long past, a reviewing of the life of a child who certainly did not grow up in the standard manner of her day.

I enjoyed it, since a great deal of the book takes place in Arizona, which is at the moment my neck of the woods again. I enjoyed seeing familiar names and learning new connections for them; and reading about the author's adventures in the various postings as they followed her father around the country. I think our little miss had quite a temper as a child, but a story from when she was not much bigger than a baby was priceless. I can just see the dismay of the men who had the following bright idea. How would they explain the mess to Mom?!

You see, our author was the pet of all the soldiers at Ship Island and made herself at home everywhere, even when her friends were supposed to be taking care of official paperwork. One day instead of sending her home and out of their hair, her three favorite friends put
"a big drop of New Orleans molasses on my fingers and thumbs, then handing me a feather from a pillow, they instructed me to pick off the feather. It kept me busy and silent. But when they next inspected, they found that I had secured the can of molasses, poked a big hole into the pillow, and not only decorated myself from head to feet like a plucked chicken, but had plastered the sides of the room with a frieze of feathers and molasses. I am firmly convinced that this episode was responsible for my nickname of 'Birdie', the only name by which I was ever identified during my entire life by those who knew us in army circles."

There are two other titles written by Hooker at Project Gutenberg, I think I will bump them up a few places on my Someday List. Just because I know Miss Birdie a little bit better now.

[Zora · Rating 2 out of 5]

Buffalo soldiers (if you didn't know) were black soldiers in the US, from the Civil War through the Indian wars, and I'm interested in reading more about them. Unfortunately, this book by a white child of a white officer, recalling her childhood forty years later, isn't very helpful.

The editor, who discovered the manuscript in family papers, apologizes for the terms she uses about various non-whites (squaw, greaser, colored, etc.) but that apology wasn't necessary for me. I understood she was a child of her time. But more disturbing is, for the first half of the book (I read no further) she never really sees any of the blacks as people. To her, they are servants and minor characters, when she bothers to think of them at all (rarely), objects of mild amusement.

In real life, the black soldiers were the important actors in this story and her family was nothing. At least her father did some work and got his hands dirty from time to time while getting the pay raises for the dangerous work his black soldiers did every day. The portrayal of the mother, though, made me loathe the woman from the moment she came on stage and pray she took an Indian arrow through the eye soon. (spoiler: alas, she didn't.) What a snobbish, nasty, selfish little piece of work that woman was. (Not the portrayal the author was trying for, I'm sure. She probably admired her mother's breeding and delicacy.) In a world where resources were limited, she was forever demanding 10 times her (already privileged white officer's) share. Other people went hungry and their children were rained on at night because of all the the mother demanded, and the author seems not a bit bothered by this.

The only reason I'm giving it a star beyond awful is that you can pick out little bits of what the black soldiers' lives must have been like and apply your own imagination to hypothesize further. (Some--she said all, but I doubt it--vied for extra duty, doing servant work in the white officer's quarters, because they could eat the family's dinner scraps...so you can infer what their own army food must have been like, if the gnawed end rejected by some six year old looked good in comparison.) And a few of the home life details are interesting. The black soldiers' wives did laundry and cooking for white officers' families (paid? unpaid? no clue) and laundry was done in half whiskey barrels, adapted once the whiskey had been imbibed. Descriptions of officer barracks (apparently, she never even noticed where the black soldiers slept) are mildly interesting.

By halfway through the book, she hadn't named or described or really looked straight at a black person. I don't care about the language. The to-the-bone racism of not even seeing those men at all is what finally made me put the book down.

[Erin Barrientez · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a great memoir! It was short and to the point (at times I think I would have appreciated more details), yet littered with sentiment! I enjoyed living her adventures through her narrative. I have been fortunate enough to visit and experience first hand the many places described in the book, which she called home(s). This- I believe- added to my enjoyment of this read, as I could very clearly picture her stories and know first hand, the unforgiving environment in which she was raised. What an extraordinary childhood, to experience the wilds of the frontier in a predominantly male environment which, no doubt, contributed to her strength of character. The frontier was an equalizer, and as revealed throughout this book, the best weapon against isolation and threat of danger, was a sense of humor!! I thoroughly enjoyed this read!

[Randall · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have been obsessed with the Nolan Expedition of 1877 for a number of years and thought I had read everything on the subject. Lt. Charles Lawrence Cooper was second in command to Captain Nolan and I learned recently that his daughter, Birdie, was an author during the 1920s and late in life began working on her memoirs.

Though her memoir was not completed in her lifetime, many years later her unfinished manuscript was edited by Steve Wilson and published by the University of Oklahoma Press. This book is the result and it is wonderful!

So many great stories. Birdie and her father knew people such as General Nelson Miles, William Shafter, and Quanah Parker. Also lots of personal stories about Army life on the frontier and what it was like for the families.

[Marieta Grissom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ms. Hooker's memory is phenomenal, and her story-telling skills are exquisite in writing this easy-to-read memoir. Her father was an officer with the Buffalo Soldiers in the Tenth Cavalry during the Indian Wars of the Southwest, thus she and her family followed him from fort to fort. We are fortunate to have a story of such detail and from a child's perspective during this historical period.

[Gary Dorman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. Learning the inside story of the lives of the soldiers and their families was fascinating. Have been to several of the places they lived and learning stories associated with them is great.

[David Grissom · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although this book is during Forrestine’s youth, I feel this is a very factual book that ties her growing up to the history of the Tenth U.S. Cavelry.

[Mikayla · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't finish this book actually. It wasn't that it was horrible or anything but it was boring. There are to many good books out there to wast my time being bored by this one.

[Jan Cleere · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rare view describing how the children of army families were caught up in the Southwest Indian wars.