Legends of the Old West - BUFFALO SOLDIERS Ep. 2 | “Florida Mountains Fight”

Episode Date: December 3, 2025

A small detachment of the 9th Cavalry from Fort Bayard in southern New Mexico Territory tracks a band of Apache who were likely responsible for an attack in Arizona Territory. The detachment follows the Apache into the Florida Mountains where the soldiers quickly find themselves surrounded. In the fight to escape the trap, the brave actions of Corporal Clinton Greaves help save his unit. Thanks to our sponsor, Quince! Use this link for Free Shipping and 365-day returns: Quince.com/lotow Join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join Apple users join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes, bingeable seasons and bonus episodes. Click the Black Barrel+ banner on Apple to get started with a 3-day free trial. For more details, visit our website www.blackbarrelmedia.com and check out our social media pages. We’re @OldWestPodcast on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. On YouTube, subscribe to LEGENDS+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: hit “Join” on the Legends YouTube homepage. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Get no frills delivered. Shop the same in-store prices online and enjoy unlimited delivery with PC Express Pass. Get your first year for $2.50 a month. Learn more at pceexpress.ca. Rising 1500 feet above the Chihuahuan Desert of southern New Mexico, just north of the Mexican border, the Florida's were jagged and dry. Their volcanic ridges were broken by steep draws and patches of thorny brush. It was late January of 1877, and the winter wind sliced down from the heights like a blade.

It whistled through the rock gaps and scattered the dust at the horse's hooves. The sun was bright and it cast long shadows. that never seemed to hold still. Corporal Clinton Greaves blinked through the glare and watched the Apache camp below. It looked quiet. A few low wikiups dotted the clearing. They were small dome-shaped shelters

of bent poles covered with brush. Cook fires smoldered in pits in the ground. Smoke curled into the sky and blew apart in the wind. Women and children worked near the fires. A few men watched the soldiers as they approached, but otherwise the camp was still. Lieutenant Henry Wright rode just ahead of Greaves as he led the small detachment from Sea Troop of the 9th Cavalry.

There were seven soldiers and three Navajo scouts. Greaves was the second in command, the ranking non-commissioned officer. He wasn't giving the orders, but he knew how quickly things could go wrong in country like this. They had been tracking this band of Apache for days. The soldiers and scouts had ridden, hard out of Fort Baird at the base of the Pinos Altos Mountains in southwestern New Mexico Territory.

Based on the Trail of the Apache, it looked like the group had started in Arizona territory and had ridden east into New Mexico. That matched reports that a group of Chiracawa Apache, joined by warriors from the Warm Springs and Mescalero bands, had crossed the border after fighting the 6th cavalry. They were not bound for a reservation. They were raiders, and they were in no mood to surrender. Lieutenant Wright rode directly into the camp. The Apache women and children didn't speak. The soldiers dismounted, and one of the Navajo scouts stepped forward to interpret. Wright told the Apache that they would be safely taken to the San Carlos reservation if they gave up their weapons and horses. Wright said there would be food and protection. Even if the group of Apache had fought

the cavalry in Arizona a few days earlier, there was no need to fight now. For a few minutes, the camp held still. Corporal Greaves looked past the fire pits and the shelters. The women who had been cooking when they arrived were no longer there. The children had vanished too. It was like watching the tide go out. Then men began to appear around the camp. Slowly, from behind wikiups, in the creases in the hills, the boulders beyond the clearing, warriors started to materialize where there had been none a moment earlier. Greaves counted six, then a dozen, then 18. They were all armed and moving into position with the warriors who had stayed visible in the camp. They were forming a ring around the ten men who had delivered themselves into a trap.

The attempt to negotiate a peaceful surrender had been well-intentioned, but in now looked like a severe miscalculation. The soldiers were surrounded, outnumbered five to one, and their only way out was to fight. From Black Barrel Media, this is Legends of the Old West. I'm your host Chris Wimmer, and this season we're telling a collection of stories about the famous buffalo soldiers. the courageous black soldiers of the infantry and cavalry who served in the West after the Civil War. This is Episode 2, Florida Mountains Fight.

In the autumn of 1875, the men of the 9th Cavalry packed their gear, mounted their horses, and rode west. They were leaving Texas behind. For nearly eight years, the regiment had crisscrossed the Lone Star Frontier doing the hard, unglomerous work of the post-Civil War Army. They escorted supply trains, guarded settlers, scouted Comanche Country, and enforced federal authority on contested ground. But now the order came down. The 9th cavalry would relieve the 8th Cavalry in New Mexico Territory.

The 9th had survived Comanche Country, and now they were heading into Apache Country. The men rode out in detachments, company by company, from posts like Fort Stockton, Fort Lancaster, and Fort Brown. For Captain Charles Byers Sea Troop, Clinton Greaves Unit, the march began at Fort Brown, near present-day Brownsville, Texas, at the mouth of the Rio Grande. The move would take three months and cover more than a thousand rugged miles across South and West Texas. They rode through Paca Station and Fort Selden, and finally into the high

country of southwestern New Mexico. Their new post was Fort Baird, dry, remote, and perched near the southern edge of a wilderness range, which would be called the Gila National Forest. The men of sea troop arrived in December when the cold wind blew hard across the ridge lines, and the nights froze early. The relocation of the entire regiment took nearly a year. By May 1876, as the 7th Cavalry started its march across Dakota Territory toward an eventual clash with Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, the 9th was spread thin across the southern Rockies. The 9th occupied seven posts, six in New Mexico and one in Southern Colorado.

Headquarters was established at Fort Union, north of the small town of Las Vegas, New Mexico. At present, the regiment's 670 man roster was misleading. Only 370 men were available for duty. The rest were sick, injured, or dispersed across a dozen other assignments. In New Mexico, garrison life was both similar and different than it was in Texas. The landscape was still harsh and the outposts were still isolated, but now there were mountain ranges and forests to contend with, in addition to rock and brush of the desert terrain. Soldiers were assigned to everything from wood-cutting details to livestock herding to road

building. Grieves's unit, Sea Troop, for example, spent part of 1876 grading and clearing the North Star Road, a primitive path over the mountains near the headwaters of the Gila River. It was demanding work in an unfamiliar land. The men were learning the terrain the only way they could, one mile at a time, often in the saddle, and almost always under strain. Colonel Edward Hatch, the regiment's commanding officer, understood how little his officers knew of the region. Determined to correct that fact, he kept detachments in near constant motion throughout 1876. That year alone, the 9th cavalry covered more than 8,800 miles on patrol. The patrols were relentless, grinding circuits of escorting mail carriers, scouting hostile territory,

and protecting isolated settlements from the ever-present threat of Apache raids. Private Henry Bush, a Canadian-born cook who served in Sea Troop, remembered his time in New Mexico as, Continuously on scouting service, subjected to great exposure, no sleep for two days, sometimes subsisting on the most meager diet, sometimes marches of 90 miles in a hot scorching sun. The work was thankless. There were few newspapers in the territory.

No one back east was paying much attention. No one was thinking about the most remote, least populated region in the country. But they would soon, and not just because of a soon-to-be legendary conflict between ranchers in Lincoln County. Detachments of the 9th cavalry would soon experience their own conflict in New Mexico, and men of their regiment would earn the nation's highest military honor. There had been conflict in New Mexico since time out of mind. The indigenous peoples of the region had fought each other forever. They fought the Spanish conquistadors who came up from the south in the 1500s and 1600s,

and then they fought the fur traders and settlers who came from the north and the east. By the late 1870s, the series of conflicts with the U.S. Army known as the Apache Wars stretched back decades. The slow, steady, westward crush of American settlers and soldiers had inevitably reshaped the Southwest. The people known collectively as Apache were not a single tribe, but many, Chiracawa, Mescalero, Ghiariah, Warm Springs, and others. They lived in scattered bands across what is now, area. Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Northern Mexico. They were fiercely independent. They were ruthless and remorseless when they raided settlements. They used the horse as a means to an end, but they didn't revere the animal like the Lakota, Cheyenne, or Comanche. And above all, they were masters of guerrilla warfare. Their strength was in movement. Small war parties struck fast and vanished. They used the terrain as cover and deception as strapped. strategy. The Apache might appear to be retreating when, in fact, they were setting up an ambush. Whether on foot or on horseback, they navigated canyons and high passes with practiced ease.

They disappeared into the rocks just as quickly as they emerged. For the U.S. Army, it was like chasing smoke through a stone maze, and by the mid-1870s, the army had grown tired of chasing. The new policy was confinement. All Apache bands, regardless of history or geography, were to relocate to a single site, the San Carlos Reservation in southeastern Arizona. To the War Department, it was an administrative fix. To the Apache, it was a death sentence. San Carlos was a hellscape with scorching summers, contaminated water,

and near constant shortages of food and supplies. It was selected for its remoteness, not for. its suitability for human life. And it was managed by a rotating cast of federal agents who ranged from incompetent to corrupt. Many Apache refused to go. Others went and soon fled. One of the first to lead in Exodus was a Chiricahua chief named who. He would later be joined by Geronimo, who at that time served as more of a spiritual leader than a battlefield commander, and Victoria, a brilliant strategist from the Warm Springs band. Victoria, especially, would become the bane of the ninth cavalry in the years to come.

By 1876, more and more Apache were slipping away from San Carlos and heading back into familiar country. Some raided for supplies. Others simply disappeared into the high desert. The army responded by increasing its patrols, sending companies like Sea Troop deeper into rough territory. They went to places where... which barely existed on a map.

The only way to find out what was there was to go. If soldiers, like Corporal Greaves, had not already seen Texas, they would have thought they were dropped into a truly alien landscape. Greaves was from Madison County, Virginia, at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. He had been born into slavery and was six years old when the Civil War started. When his family was freed, they moved north to Maryland and settled in Prince George's County outside Washington, D.C. In 1872, at age 17, Greaves enlisted in the U.S. Army.

Like many young black men of the era, military service promised more than a wage. It offered structure, purpose, and a chance to prove himself. Greaves signed a five-year enlistment and joined the 9th cavalry. He joined Sea Troop while it was in Texas. By the time the unit was transferred to New Mexico, Greaves had earned the rank of corporal. He was steady, observant, and respected. He followed orders, learned fast, and didn't rattle easily. By the time he arrived at Fort Baird in December 1876, the situation along the New Mexico-Arizona border was deteriorating fast.

Apache groups who avoided San Carlos formed temporary alliances. They slipped through the mountains from Arizona to New Mexico and started clashing with army patrols. A month after Greaves arrived at Fort Baird, reports out of Arizona told of a war party that had fought the 6th Cavalry and crossed into the Florida Mountains in the southwest corner of New Mexico. The mountains were a tiny range of ridges about 50 miles south of the fort between the town of Deming and the Mexican border. Colonel Edward Hatch, the commander of the 9th Cavalry, ordered sea troop into motion.

A few days later, Lieutenant Henry Wright, Corporal C. Clinton Greaves and eight other men would be in the fight for their lives. The detachment of ten men from Sea Troop, one white commanding officer, six black enlisted soldiers, and three Navajo scouts, spent several hard days in the saddle. They found the trail of the war party and tracked it into the Florida mountains. On January 24th, a sunny and cold day, they spotted the camp. of the war party in a clearing. Several wikiups and cook fires

dotted the open ground where the Apache group made its home. Women and children worked at the fires. There were a few men in camp, but not as many as would have been expected for a camp of that size. Lieutenant Wright led the detachment down into the camp,

and he worked with a Navajo scout as a translator for about 30 minutes trying to convince the Apache to surrender. But during the parley, the women and children disappeared from the camp. Slowly, 18 warriors emerged from the rocks and joined those who were already present. The warriors formed a ring around the ten-man detachment. The soldiers and scouts were outnumbered five to one. There was never any hope of negotiation or surrender. The detachment had ridden into a

trap. Lieutenant Henry Wright gave the only order he could. Break out. The troopers opened fire. Carbeen snapped and cracked in rapid succession. The Apache fired back with rifles and arrows. Horses reared and men shouted as the action dissolved from a close-range gunfight to a hand-to-hand brawl. Corporal Clinton Greaves didn't have time to reload. After he fired his final round, he reversed his carbine in his hands, held it by the barrel like a baseball bat, and started swinging.

He crashed it into the shoulder of one attacker, then pivoted to strike another in the ribs. The buttstock cracked and splintered, but Greaves kept swinging. As he drove back the warriors closest to him, the soldiers around him soon realized Greaves wasn't just holding his ground. He was creating space. Each blow cleared inches, and then feet. The other soldiers pressed toward the breach he was opening. Private Richard Epps fired point-blank at a warrior blocking their path.

Private Richard McAdoo dropped another. Lieutenant Wright fired his revolver as he moved, trying to keep the group together in the chaos. Greaves stayed at the center of all of it and kept swinging his rifle like a club with all the ferocity he could muster. The other six soldiers pushed through the narrow gap Greaves created and escaped the ring of warriors.

The three Navajo scouts had already mounted their horses and were providing covering fire. The soldiers hurried, one after another, into their saddles. Grieves was the last man out. The men of the detachment spurred their horses and rode hard out of the clearing. Behind them, five Apache warriors lay dead. Several others were wounded, but the rest had faded back into the draws, ridge lines, and boulder fields of the Florida mountains. They had sprung a well-laid trap on the army patrol. They caught the soldiers in open ground, had them outnumbered and surrounded, but the trap backfired. All

All of the soldiers and scouts survived. They escaped northeast to Fort Cummings. And to add insult to the Apache injury, the soldiers captured 11 Apache horses during their flight out of the Florida Mountains. They arrived at the fort with trophies, probably some frayed nerves, and a harrowing story of a patrol which could have been a massacre.

When Captain Charles Byer, the commander of Sea Trojan, learned of the narrow escape of his detachment from the Apache camp, he wasted no time. Four days later, he led the rest of Sea Troop back into the Florida Mountains. By then, to no surprise, the Apache had abandoned their camp. The people had vanished, but they clearly believed that more soldiers were going to arrive at any minute. They left loads of supplies behind and some of their horses. The soldiers destroyed the camp and took the horses. It was a small tactical victory, highlighted by heroic actions,

but the 9th cavalry started to learn the pattern of fighting Apaches. The Apache rarely stayed put. They struck, scattered, and regrouped elsewhere. Like the Comanche in the flatlands of West Texas, the Apache seemed to know every rock and bush in southern Arizona and New Mexico. After the fight in the Florida Mountains, Lieutenant Henry Wright submitted a report praising the actions of his men. He commended the entire detachment for their discipline and courage under fire, but five names stood out.

Greaves, Epps, Macadou, John Q. Adams, and a Navajo scout named Jose Chavez. Of those, one name stood above the rest. Lieutenant Wright's report left no doubt what had happened or who had made the escape possible. Wright recommended certificates of merit for Epps, Macadou, Adams, and Chavez. For Greaves, he asked for more, the Medal of Honor. In Wright's account, Greaves' refusal to give ground at the center of the melee had been the decisive moment of the engagement. When the ring of Apache warriors closed, it was Greaves who swung his empty carbine

and beat back the enemy until the rest of the soldiers could break free. The initial endorsements came quickly. Colonel Edward Hatch, the Ninth Cavalry's commander, approved them without hesitation. The department headquarters concurred. For a moment, it looked as if all five men might be recognized. Then the regulations intervened. Under official army policy in 1877, the rules required each recommendation to be submitted as an individual citation. Wright had forwarded the four certificate nominations together.

On that technicality, the warded. Department rejected them all. And since the Certificate of Merit was strictly limited to privates, Corporal Clinton Greaves wasn't eligible. In terms of the rules, at least he was submitted individually for a commendation. But for Greaves, the problem was that the process moved even slower than it does today. There was no central awards board, no statutory time limit, and no dedicated staff to Shepard nominations pass the bureaucratic red tape. Recomendations moved when an officer in the chain made them move, and could just as easily stall in a pile of correspondence.

Frontier skirmishes like the Florida Mountains fight competed for attention with larger campaigns and national events. In January of 1877, the Army was far more focused on continuing to chase Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse around the Northern Plains after the Battle of the Little Big Horn the previous summer. And by the summer of 1877, the Army would be focused on chasing and for fighting the Nespers, as they made their historic race to join Sitting Bull in Canada. And if those things hadn't been happening, there was still no guarantee that even a fully endorsed recommendation would be acted upon quickly. But given all those things, the process

moved about as quickly as could be expected in the case of Corporal Clinton Greaves. And it kept moving because the officers in the chain of command kept the fire lit. From Lieutenant Wright to Colonel Hatch to the departmental commander. They were unanimous in their point. Without grieves, the detachment would not have survived. His conduct was more than brave. It was essential to the mission's outcome, and it saved the lives of his fellow soldiers. On June 26, 1879, two and a half years after the Florida Mountains fight, President Rutherford B. Hayes awarded Corporal Clinton Greaves with the Medal of Honor. He was the second black soldier to receive the honor after the Civil War, following a fellow Buffalo soldier of the 9th

cavalry named Emmanuel Stance, who had earned the award for helping rescue a captive from the Apache in 1870. Unlike many citations of the era, which often reduced valor to a single vague phrase like for gallantry in action, or for distinguished conduct. Grieve's citation was unusually specific. It read, While part of a small detachment to persuade a band of renegade Apache Indians to surrender, his group was surrounded. Corporal Grieves, in the center of the savage hand-to-hand fighting,

managed to shoot and bash a gap through the swarming Apaches, permitting his companions to break free. After receiving the honor, Greaves kept the same quiet bearing he had shown in the field. By that time, Greaves had transferred to H. Troop of the 10th Cavalry. His first five-year enlistment was up in 1877, not long after the Florida Mountains fight. He immediately re-enlisted and joined H. Troop, in which he would serve for the next decade on the frontier. As the years passed, the story of the story. of the Florida Mountains fight grew in the retelling. By 1889, a version circulated that inflated

the numbers to 13 soldiers against 65 Apache warriors and credited their leadership to the famous Apache chief, Victoria. Troops from the 9th and 10th cavalry had chased Victoria down into Mexico a couple years after the Florida Mountains fight, and the pursuit became part of the lore of the Old West era. By the early 1890s, Greaves' long years in the field were behind him. He transferred to the Columbus Barracks in Ohio, one of the Army's main recruiting depots, where new soldiers were mustered, trained, and assigned to regiments. Grieves helped prepare young black recruits for the life ahead of them in the military, the discipline, drill, and the realities of frontier duty. Grieves remained in the

army until 1893, completing more than two decades of service. After his discharge, he stayed in Columbus and took civilian work for the quartermaster department at the barracks. He and his wife Bertha made a modest living together until his death from heart disease in 1906. But his name and likeness live on, beyond army enrollment records and the multitude of places which track and honor recipients of the Medal of Honor. Today, unfortunately, Fort Baird in southern New Mexico is falling to ruin. It was an active army base from 1866 until 1900 and then spent most of the next 110 years as a hospital facility. Since 2010, when the hospital closed, the fort has slowly and steadily fallen into disrepair. It's a national historic

landmark, but it's not like some of the other forts in the west which are part of the national park system and are well maintained. Still, visitors can go to old Fort Baird. And there, in the center of the grounds is a life-size bronze statue of Clinton Greaves on top of a white stone pedestal. It's one of the only things in the compound which has stood the test of time, and it's not alone in honoring the corporal. On the other side of the world in South Korea is a former U.S. military base called Camp Greaves. It was operational from 1953 to 2004. Over the years since the military stopped using it and gave up the facility, it's turned into an arts and cultural center, but it still bears the name Camp Greaves. It's a pretty remarkable legacy for a corporal from the

Old West era, even one who received the American military's highest honor for bravery. Next time on Legends of the Old West, it's the story of the so-called Meeker incident and the Battle of Milk Creek in Colorado. When the people of the White River Ute Indian Agency rebel against the harsh treatment of Indian agent Nathan Meeker, Ute Warriors trap an army column, which responds to the uprising. Troopers from the 9th Cavalry provide life-saving reinforcements before the battle turns into utter destruction. That's next week on Legends of the Older.

West. Members of our Black Barrel Plus program receive the entire season to binge all at once with no commercials, and they also receive exclusive bonus episodes. Sign up now through the link in the show notes or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com. This episode was researched and written by Matthew Kearns, original music by Rob Valier. I'm Chris Wimmer. Thanks for listening.