Sgt. George Jordan — Buffalo Soldier

I’m working on a couple of podcast episodes about the Buffalo Soldiers, the Black cavalrymen who rode for the U.S. Army after the Civil War. One of them tells the story of Sergeant George Jordan.

Jordan was born enslaved in Williamson County, Tennessee, just southwest of Nashville. He joined the 38th Infantry of the US Colored Troops in 1866, and then later Company K of the 9th Cavalry Regiment. Jordan rose through the ranks, and became the kind of soldier officers leaned on when everything went to hell.

At Fort Tularosa in 1880, he organized a handful of soldiers and civilians to hold off a hundred Apache warriors. A year later at Carrizo Canyon, he and fellow sergeant Thomas Shaw held the line in an ambush that should have wiped their patrol out. For those fights, Jordan earned the Medal of Honor.

But years later, when his health broke down from over thirty years of service, the Army hospital at Fort Robinson turned him away. The post commander was out, and the surgeon on duty flatly refused to treat him. If Jordan wanted care, he was told, he should travel all the way to Washington, D.C.—an impossible journey for a sick, aging man on the Nebraska frontier. He tried again, making a second application for admission, and was turned away a second time. Chaplain William T. Anderson later wrote that “First Sergt. George Jordan, retired, died for the want of proper attention.”

He didn’t die from wounds taken in battle. He died from neglect—because the government that had taken his youth and strength in uniform wouldn’t claim responsibility once it had nothing left to use.

That was George Jordan’s fate. And in some ways it was the Buffalo Soldiers’ story writ large. Time and again, they were asked to do the hardest jobs, to hold the line in the harshest country, to bleed for a nation that doubted them in peace and leaned on them in war. Their courage ensured survival of their fellow soldiers in the moment, was cited for valor in the official record, but their humanity was too often forgotten the moment the bugle stopped sounding.