Buffalo Soldier’s story finally is told, by kin

Civil War veteran George Hutchinson has been forgotten by everyone but his family.

He is buried at Los Angeles National Cemetery in Westwood -- under a tombstone that misspells his name and fails to mention his 50-year career as a Buffalo Soldier.

But now his feisty descendants are determined to right some wrongs.

Hutchinson, an African American, served as a Union soldier in the Civil War and was among the first of the so-called Buffalo Soldiers, cavalry who fought in the Indian wars on the Western frontier.

Some say the black soldiers’ nickname was coined because their hair purportedly resembled the mane of a bison, or buffalo. Others say American Indians -- who were fighting to keep their land -- named the soldiers after the Cheyenne symbol for bravery, the buffalo.

“Although my great-grandfather had fairly straight hair, he wore his nickname proudly,” said Gwen Robinson, 69, in an interview at her Victorville home.

Robinson has traced her family’s path through the woodlands of the South and the deserts of the West. She says her great-grandfather played a crucial but mostly unsung role in the settlement of the American frontier.

George Hutchinson helped lay roads and telegraph lines, repaired old buildings and put up new ones, and protected stagecoaches and wagon trains from renegade bands of Indians until Apache chief Geronimo surrendered in 1886, she said.

“He also knew [Lt. Col. George Armstrong] Custer, but he didn’t speak too kindly of him,” Robinson said. Custer’s “ego was sky high. He didn’t mingle with the rank and file.”

As the family historian, Robinson is laden with lovingly kept scrapbooks, and she recently acquired copies of official documents proving that her great-grandfather served not only in the Civil War but also as an Army private and later a sergeant in the Buffalo Soldiers from 1866 to 1915.

Hutchinson died two years before Robinson was born, but her grandparents and parents passed down the family history. Now, after 15 years of writing letters and filling out forms to document her forebear’s claim, she is ready to petition for a new headstone.

Determination runs in the family.

“Whenever someone told me I couldn’t do it, I did it,” Robinson said. A retired nurse, she survived polio as a child, 22 major surgeries, three strokes and two heart attacks.

Today, she uses a wheelchair, but that wasn’t always the case -- even after the polio.

“Since I was a little girl and the doctors ... said I would never walk again, I proved them wrong and ran track in high school,” Robinson said.

She cherishes her family history, passed down orally through the generations, and believes it gives her strength.

“Most of my friends don’t have any idea about their family history,” Robinson said. Just knowing she had ancestors who had overcome massive hardships boosted her self-esteem.

“Oh, I was feisty,” she said. “I was suspended for a few days in high school for arguing with my teacher when she told us that there was no such thing as a black cowboy.”

Her quest to properly honor her great-grandfather began in 1992 after another black soldier, Gen. Colin L. Powell -- then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- dedicated a memorial to the Buffalo Soldiers at Ft. Leavenworth, Kan., where the black 9th and 10th Cavalry regiments had been based.

After the event, Robinson’s sister, Jendra Hutchinson, went to the national cemetery in Westwood to look up their great-grandfather.

“We always heard he was buried there, but I wanted to make sure,” Jendra Hutchinson said. “It took me three hours to find him, and when I did, I was shocked to find his name misspelled and his long service as a Buffalo Soldier missing from his marker.”

The tombstone spells his name “Hutchins.”

“The girl in the office looked up in a big brown book the names of those buried at the time of my great-grandfather’s death and said, ‘We don’t have a Hutchinson, but we have a Hutchins,’ ” Jendra Hutchinson said. The birth and death dates match, as do the wife’s name, his Civil War regiment and the notation “CLD” -- colored.

After family members decided to document their ancestor’s career, Robinson wrote to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Interior Department and the Defense Department.

As copies of birth, death, marriage, military and pension records poured in, so did other details. Hutchinson’s medical records reveal that he had two stays in the 1870s and 1880s in military hospitals for syphilis, “not contracted in line of duty.”

George Hutchinson was born March 1841 in Clark County, Ky. Family members believe his father was a white plantation owner and his mother a slave.

According to family lore, “his father refused to have a son of his born a slave and signed papers making him a free person,” Robinson said. Although she petitioned for those papers, they have not been found.

But the documents she obtained, combined with family history, paint a detailed portrait of her great-grandfather:

“He learned to read and write and eventually spoke six languages,” she said. “He was a skilled horseman [and] carpenter ... known for his artistic lace ironwork detailing on many of the Southern mansions.”

In June 1864, Hutchinson joined the Yankees at Camp Nelson, Ky., a supply depot that processed thousands of African Americans into the Union Army.

Hutchinson belonged to Company C, 116th Regiment of Colored Infantry Volunteers. Within six months, he had been wounded while driving a supply wagon at Dutch Gap, Va. Discharged at the end of the war in 1865, he married a freed slave named Josephine Crockett in Wytheville, Va.

“Josie was beautiful, but she never learned to read or write,” Robinson said. “That’s why she made sure all of her eight children were educated at schools on Indian reservations.” The family believes that Josephine was Davy Crockett’s granddaughter.

With jobs hard to find, the newlyweds journeyed to Greenville, La., where Hutchinson enlisted in the Army for five years. In October 1866, he joined Troop F of the 9th Cavalry Regiment of the Buffalo Soldiers, earning $13 a month. It was the first time blacks had been allowed to serve in the military and bear arms during peacetime.

In 1867, when Hutchinson’s regiment was ordered to San Antonio, there were 885 black enlisted men, according to historical records.

Black soldiers got the worst rations, the worst horses, the worst guns and the worst housing, Robinson said. Still, they took pride in their duty, being awarded 20 Medals of Honor.

While Hutchinson fought in Indian campaigns throughout the Southwest, his wife “delivered more than 1,000 babies on various reservations,” Robinson said.

In 1871, Hutchinson and his family moved to Ft. McKavett, Texas. In 1876, he was reassigned to L Troop at Ft. Bliss, Texas, and in 1881 to Company A of the 10th Cavalry at Ft. Davis, Texas, which is now a national historic site.

Over the next several years, military records show, he served at forts in New Mexico and Colorado while Buffalo Soldiers were battling Geronimo.

Hutchinson eventually returned to Ft. Bliss, where he worked as a blacksmith until retiring in 1915.

Over the years, he and members of his family moved to California. Hutchinson died at Los Angeles County General Hospital in 1936, at age 95. The cause of death was listed as “senility.”

By then, his history had been forgotten, Robinson said.

“He was just another colored soldier who had a legal right to be buried” at the Westwood cemetery.