The Black Soldiers Who Built America's National Parks

They protected the wilderness, but history erased them

In 2024, the National Park Service renamed a giant sequoia tree in Sequoia National Park after Brigadier General Charles Young, commemorating the posthumous promotion of the man who, in 1903, became the first Black superintendent of any national park in America. Most visitors driving past have no idea they’re on a road his troops built, walking trails his men carved, and standing in awe of the wilderness that Black soldiers fought to preserve.

The Buffalo Soldiers, as they came to be known, were members of the first all-Black regiments authorized for the standing US Army. They were established in 1866 as the country attempted to stitch itself back together after the Civil War, and were supposedly named by Native Americans who saw a resemblance between their hair and the mane of buffalo and/or between their battlefield toughness and the power of the animal. More than 180,000 African Americans had fought for the Union, but this was the first time Black men could serve in the permanent military. The Black community considered this a significant victory.

That said, the Army had no intention of letting these soldiers serve in comfort. They were stationed at outposts in unforgiving terrain, far from the cities where their presence might unsettle white civilians. They fought in the so-called Indian Wars: a centuries-long struggle driven by US territorial expansion and the systematic displacement of Indigenous nations.

Beginning in 1899, they were sent to patrol and protect Yosemite, Sequoia, and General Grant National Parks, performing what we would now call park ranger duties, years before that job title existed. While these parks had been established by 1890, the federal government initially lacked a dedicated civilian agency to manage them, leading to the deployment of the US Army to fill the void. These soldiers became the primary line of defense against illegal resource extraction, patrolling the vast wilderness to intercept poachers, loggers, and even livestock that threatened to overgraze.

The wilderness that wouldn’t exist

The mythology of American national parks is one of untouched wilderness preserved for future generations by forward-thinking conservationists. People like John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt routinely get the credit. The reality is more complicated.

The parks were patrolled, maintained, and physically shaped by Black soldiers who couldn’t vote in much of the country, who were barred from most public accommodations, and who were stationed in remote posts specifically because white Americans didn’t want them in cities. That iconic ranger hat with the peaked crown even draws from the headgear Buffalo Soldiers wore in the field.

And yet most Americans have never heard of them, at least not in the context of their work for national parks.

In 1889, Charles Young was the third Black man to graduate from West Point. He had initially not been accepted despite scoring the second highest on the entrance exam, so he waited a year for the candidate ahead of him to drop out. When he was finally admitted, he suffered through four years of hostility from classmates who refused to speak to him and instructors who made it clear he wasn’t welcome. A failing grade on his final engineering exam nearly derailed him months before graduation. After extra instruction from his professor, he sat for the exam again and passed.

Upon graduation, Young was commissioned as a second lieutenant, the standard entry-level rank for all West Point graduates. However, the Army then waited three months to assign him anywhere, because military leaders refused to let a Black officer lead white troops.

Young eventually rose through the ranks despite every institutional obstacle thrown in his path. Because the military was segregated, he was frequently denied professional development opportunities, including study leave, and passed over for assignments that typically accelerated promotion.

By 1903, he was a captain commanding Troops I and M of the Ninth Cavalry at San Francisco’s Presidio (a major Army post and coastal defense site at the tip of the San Francisco peninsula) when he was ordered to take his men to Sequoia and General Grant National Parks for the summer. What followed was one of the most productive tenures in early park history.

Brigadier General Charles Young

In the three years before Young arrived, previous commanders had managed to complete less than five miles of roadway, which had gone effectively unused because it didn’t reach the actual sequoia groves. Young pushed to get started early on extending the road, and spent the summer supervising both soldiers and civilian contractors.

By mid-August, wagon wheels were rolling into the Giant Forest for the first time in the park’s history. His crews kept at it, carving the route all the way to Moro Rock, a massive granite dome located about eight miles from the park’s original entrance. He reported that the road “should in future ensure a thousand tourists where in previous years there have been but a hundred.” The parks would never be the same. Visitors started arriving in numbers no one had seen before.

Young also stopped poaching violations entirely, improved over 18 miles of trail, and convinced private landowners to sign contracts selling their land to the parks. When the nearby town of Visalia wanted to name a sequoia in his honor, he declined, asking them to revisit the idea in 20 years. If they still felt the same way, he said, he would accept. By 1923, however, Young had passed away, and the nation’s tightening Jim Crow laws had begun to push the contributions of Black soldiers out of the public narrative. It would take a full century for Visalia’s proposed gesture to be completed.

What we choose to remember

Between 1899 and 1915, Buffalo soldiers like Charles Young left their mark on more than 20 locations now managed by the National Park Service.They built the Mauna Loa Trail in Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park, using sledgehammers that weighed up to 12 pounds to beat volcanic rock into walkable paths. They installed telegraph lines near Fort Davis in West Texas. They fought wildland fires near what is now Glacier National Park.

Brigadier General Charles Young tree at Sequoia National Park

While their summers in the Sierra Nevada and the Pacific were defined by physical labor and protection of the land, many Buffalo Soldiers transitioned from these rugged assignments into pivotal roles that shaped American military and diplomatic history in the decades that followed. More than 450 of them are buried at the Presidio of San Francisco, including Private William H. Thompkins, who received a Medal of Honor for his valor in rescuing wounded comrades during the Spanish-American War.

Later in his life, Charles Young went on to serve as the first American military attaché posted to Haiti and the Dominican Republic. He was also the sole Black officer among two dozen serving diplomatic roles under Theodore Roosevelt. In Liberia, he overhauled the national defense force and directed construction of roads into the interior. He fought in Mexico against Pancho Villa.

When World War I broke out, he was passed over for command due to “health issues,” specifically high blood pressure and Bright’s disease (a kidney condition). Despite these diagnoses, Young’s prior service record showed no evidence that the conditions had impaired his performance in the field. He rode 500 miles on horseback from Ohio to Washington, DC, to prove his fitness. He was 54 years old. The Army still sent him to train Black recruits in Ohio instead of leading troops in Europe.

Young died in Nigeria in 1922 at age 58. He was the fourth soldier in history to receive a funeral service at Arlington Memorial Amphitheater before burial. In October 2021, nearly a century after his death, he was posthumously promoted to brigadier general. The Army granted this rare honor to right a wrong, acknowledging that his 1917 medical retirement was a pretext used to bypass him for promotion due to the racial prejudices of the time.

During the ceremony, Under Secretary of the Army Gabe Camarillo noted, “While Charles Young may have been constrained and stifled by the age in which he lived, he did not defer his dreams. His promotion... has been a long time delayed, but no longer denied.” The sequoia tree bearing his name now stands across the road from the Booker T. Washington Tree, which Young himself had named in 1903. The road between them is the one his troops built.