Buffalo Soldiers in the 1880s

Throughout the 1880s the Buffalo Soldiers remained on the frontier. Their main duties included protecting the development of the railroads, telegraph lines, stagecoach lines and stations, US mail routes and frontier towns. They also tried to maintain order in territorial conflicts on the Plains and in the Southwest. These conflicts arose with increasing presence of European-American settlers in Tribal Nations’ homelands.

While many of the interactions between Buffalo Soldiers and Tribal Nations served to protect European-Americans, in the 1880s some of the Buffalo Soldier units were sent to Oklahoma and Utah to keep European-American settlers from encroaching on Indigenous land.