The following profiles were developed to celebrate Black History Month.
Captain Charles Young and his Buffalo Soldiers
There are no black faces in the pantheon of heroes of the Sierra. All of them, from the explorer Joseph Walker to John Muir and Ansel Adams and everyone in between, are white.
But Captain Charles Young, the third black American to graduate from West Point, and his Buffalo Soldiers protected Yosemite, Sequoia, and Kings Canyon National Parks in the late 1890s and early 1900s. There was no Park Service until 1916, so the U.S. Army was in charge in the few parks that existed. Duties included building trails and chasing out sheep and cattle herders and poachers.
Young and his comrades, who patrolled on horseback, made contributions that so impressed the local community that they demanded that Captain Young be honored with a giant sequoia named for him. Young refused, asserting that these lofty beings should bear the name of no man. But he later relented and named a giant sequoia in honor of his contemporary, Booker T. Washington.
Young, who rose to the rank of colonel, spoke six languages, including Latin and Greek, and became a professor at Wilberforce University in Ohio. "When he died in 1922, every African American school in the country closed in his honor," said Shelton Johnson, a black ranger at Yosemite who has become an expert on the Buffalo Soldiers.
The Bransford Family and Mammoth Caves, Kentucky
When Kentucky's Mammoth Caves were opened to the public in 1838, the guides were three enslaved Africans: Nick and Mat Bransford and Stephen Bishop. As Audrey Peterman observed in congressional testimony, "The visitors were instructed to follow every instruction of these enslaved men instantly and without question. So they had the dubious distinction of being 'slaves' above ground and masters underground."
When the Bransfords became too old to lead the tours, they were succeeded by Mat's son Henry. In fact, four generations of the family led the tours, from 1838 to 1939. Congress authorized Mammoth Caves' addition to the National Park System in 1926, but it did not actually become a park until two years after the last Bransford retired.
The Bransfords discovered a number of the passageways in this, the world's longest recorded cave system at 345 miles. Over their century of leading tours, they imparted tremendous knowledge to visitors and helped instill in them an appreciation of the natural world.
