Cathay Williams: The Buffalo Soldier Who Was A Woman

On the 14th of October 1868 an Army surgeon at Fort Bayard signed a certificate discharging Private William Cathay for chronic illness. He wrote he. The private was a woman, and she had been faking the illness to get out. Twenty-four years later a second government doctor examined her, recorded that she had lost every toe on both feet, and found her not disabled. Both documents survive. The paper the Army filed on her still describes a man. *Sources* Cathay Williams — Wikipedia, on her birth in Independence, the enlistment of 15 November 1866, the 38th Infantry, the discharge, and the pension claim of June 1891 and its rejection Cathay Williams — National Park Service, on the Civil War years with Sheridan, the discharge by Captain Charles E. Clarke on 14 October 1868, and her later life in Trinidad The Only Female Buffalo Soldier — Atlas Obscura, on the surgeon's certificate, the hospital admissions, the amputations recorded in the pension examination, and her death St. Louis Daily Times, 2 January 1876 — the only interview she ever gave, and the source of every word of hers in this video