Child of the Fighting Tenth: On the Frontier with the Buffalo Soldiers

This memoir by Forrestine Cooper Hooker details her childhood and young adulthood in the midst of the frontier cavalry. Hooker's father, Charles Cooper, was an officer in the Tenth U.S. Cavalry, one of two regiments with black troops, known as the Buffalo Soldiers, commanded by white officers. Hooker's stories capture the drama of growing up in the frontier army, the Indian wars on the plains, the Geronimo campaign in the Southwest and Mexico, her love for the regiment and the Buffalo Soldiers, their admiration for her, and even her lost love for a dashing young cavalry officer. Her narrative is by turns compelling, charming, humorous, and warm. As Laura Ingalls Wilder depicted farm life on the frontier, so Forrestine Cooper Hooker depicts army life.

Forrestine Cooper Hooker wrote nine novels for young adults based on her life growing up in the frontier army and as a ranch woman when she married into the family of the largest ranch in southern Arizona. As early as 1924, her publisher Russell Doubleday wanted her to write her memoirs, which she called Trails of My Western Yesterdays. She was working on the manuscript when she died in 1932 at age 65.
Editor Steve Wilson is the author of Oklahoma Treasures and Treasure Tales (U of OK Press, 1976) & Wichita Falls: A Pictorial History (Donning, 1982), and director emeritus of the Museum of the Great Plains, Lawton, OK.