Hollis Ellis; One of the Last of Army’s ‘Buffalo Soldiers’

Hollis Ellis, one of the last of that minute band of black cavalrymen christened “Buffalo Soldiers” in the early part of the century, has died of cancer in Los Angeles.

A spokesman for Angelus Funeral Home said he died Monday at age 87. He had retired from the Army in 1948 and spent the next 25 years working as a facilities manager for the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Hollis, a native of Texas and one of seven children, enlisted in the 10th Cavalry at Ft. Huachuca, Ariz., in 1927. At the time he joined, it was a crack unit of 5,000 horsemen clad in shiny knee-high riding boots and sporting the Army’s equivalent of Smokey the Bear campaign hats.

Although the military was segregated and predominantly white during that era and for many years afterward, the Army had had all-black cavalry units for decades, particularly in the Old West, where they patrolled the frontier from Montana to Texas.

They fought Native Americans during the territorial wars of the late 19th Century and later pursued Pancho Villa through the desolate deserts of America and Mexico in 1916. They also had served with Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders in Cuba during the Spanish-American War.

In 1991 Ellis and a few of the surviving Buffalo Soldiers gathered in Los Angeles to commemorate the 50th anniversary of their assignment to Camp Lockett near Campo, Calif., east of San Diego.

There along the Mexican border, thousands of horsemen had patrolled acres of leased cattle land to prevent any Japanese invasion of the United States through Mexico.

It was during that period of World War II that Ellis and the other accomplished horsemen began to realize that their place in the sun had been eclipsed.

“Horses just didn’t fit in the mechanized Army,” Ellis remembered thinking at the time. “But we looked good. . . . We were sharp.”

His survivors include his wife, Audrey.