A lone Buffalo Soldier on horseback captures a moment of dignity in African American military history.
Real Photo Postcards (RPPCs) offer tangible connections to history, yet they often emerge from a family photo album or shoebox collection entirely without context. Piecing together their stories requires careful observation and historical research, picking up valuable clues along the way.
Today’s case is an image of a lone Buffalo Soldier on horseback, printed sometime between 1904 and 1918. This postcard captures a moment of dignity in African American military history. The soldier sits tall in the saddle, wearing a formal military dress cap (rather than the campaign hat often associated with frontier service) and a meticulously maintained uniform. The setting—featuring a substantial brick building and cement sidewalk—suggests an established military installation rather than a frontier outpost.
The man is likely from the 9th or 10th Cavalry, and two military posts stand out: Fort Robinson in Nebraska and Fort Myer in Virginia, both important locations in Buffalo Soldier history.
Western Bastion
From 1887 to 1898, Fort Robinson served as Regimental Headquarters for Buffalo Soldier cavalry and infantry units. The 9th Cavalry Regiment made its headquarters there beginning in 1887, serving with distinction and boasting ten Medal of Honor winners from the Indian Wars. The Buffalo Soldiers at Fort Robinson earned a reputation for discipline and effectiveness that would later influence their assignments to more prestigious postings.
The 10th Cavalry Regiment maintained a significant presence at Fort Robinson during the early 1900s. The substantial brick buildings and newly constructed cement sidewalks visible in the photograph align with Fort Robinson’s infrastructure during this period, as the fort underwent significant modernization around this time. The formal dress uniform and cap in the photograph suggest this might have been a commissioned officer or a non-commissioned officer in a ceremonial or garrison role at the fort.
Nation’s Capital
Troop K of the 9th Cavalry served at Fort Myer in Virginia from May 25, 1891, to October 3, 1894, under the command of Major Guy Henry, a Medal of Honor recipient. This prestigious assignment bears a direct link to Fort Robinson. The selection of Troop K for this assignment was a recognition of the outstanding performance at Fort Robinson and other western posts.
The post at Fort Myer was the first time after the Civil War that an African American unit was stationed east of the Mississippi River near a major metropolitan area. The dignified formal pose and military dress cap would be consistent with a soldier stationed at this prestigious posting adjacent to Arlington Cemetery and Washington D.C., where ceremonial duties would have been part of their responsibilities. Both geographic and symbolic, the lauded post demonstrates how the Buffalo Soldiers earned respect through excellence despite pervasive racial prejudice.
While the AZO markings suggest a 1904-1918 printing date for this postcard, it’s possible the photograph itself was taken earlier. Many soldiers had formal portrait photographs taken to commemorate their service, which were later reproduced as postcards. If this soldier served at Fort Myer with Troop K (1891-1894), the image could have been reproduced on AZO stock years later. Alternatively, if the image dates to the 1904-1907 period, it likely shows a 10th Cavalry soldier at Fort Robinson. Without identifying marks or annotations, we can only speculate.
In either case, the photograph reveals a poignant moment during a complex era of American history. The soldier’s strong gaze suggest a person aware of his place in this important legacy. The Buffalo Soldiers’ contributions to American military history invite deeper study, recognition, and remembrance.
Vintage postcards reveal America’s enduring love affair with wild spaces. Through war, depression, and social upheaval, we’ve preserved these sanctuaries of peace.
On an autumn morning in 1935, Eleanor Roosevelt walked alone through the woods at her personal retreat in Hyde Park, New York. The First Lady had just returned from touring poverty-stricken areas in West Virginia, where families struggled to survive the Great Depression.
These morning walks were her ritual for processing the weight of what she witnessed in her tireless work. The woods, she would later write, helped her find the clarity needed to transform empathy into action.
Decades earlier, John Muir had written to a friend. His words would become a rallying cry for the American conservation movement, adorning everything from park posters to backpack patches.
The mountains are calling and I must go.
But what exactly is this call we hear from nature? Why do we feel drawn to preserve wild spaces and to protect them for future generations? And what happens to us when we answer that call?
The ephemera spread across my desk capture America’s parks in saturated colors and earnest prose. Welcome to Yosemite and Camp Curry! The hope is that some special part of life is revealed.
These mass-produced mementos tell a story of democratic access to wilderness, of a shared heritage preserved through an unprecedented system of public lands. But they also hint at something deeper – our innate recognition that we need these spaces not just for recreation, but for restoration.
The same wisdom that guided Eleanor Roosevelt to seek solitude among the trees has been confirmed by modern science: nature calms us at a biological level.
Science of Serenity
When we step into a forest, our bodies respond immediately. Cortisol levels drop. Blood pressure decreases. Our parasympathetic nervous system – responsible for rest and recovery – becomes more active.
Even our visual processing changes: natural fractal patterns, like those found in tree branches and leaf veins, require less cognitive effort to process than the sharp angles and straight lines of human-made environments.
Trees release compounds called phytoncides that, when inhaled, enhance immune function and reduce stress hormones. Natural sounds – running water, rustling leaves, bird songs – engage our attention in a way that promotes neural restoration rather than fatigue.
Physiologically, exposure to diverse natural environments even affects our microbiome – the community of microorganisms living in and on our bodies. This microscopic ecosystem influences everything from mood regulation to stress response through the gut-brain axis. In a very literal sense, communion with nature changes who we are.
Preserving Peace
The story of how Americans came to preserve our wild spaces is, in many ways, a story about seeking peace – both personal and collective. The movement gained momentum after the Civil War, as a wounded nation looked westward not just for expansion, but for healing.
Frederick Law Olmsted, who fought depression throughout his life, designed public parks as democratic spaces where people of all classes could find restoration. His work on New York’s Central Park and other urban green spaces was guided by his belief that nature’s tranquility could help ease social tensions and promote civic harmony.
John Muir found his own peace in the Sierra Nevada after wandering the war-torn South as a young man. His passionate advocacy helped establish Yosemite National Park and inspired generations of conservationists.
But it was President Theodore Roosevelt, another seeker of nature’s consolation, who would transform individual inspiration into national policy. Roosevelt’s experience finding solace in the Dakota Territory after the deaths of his wife and mother shaped his approach to conservation. He understood viscerally that wilderness could heal, that it offered something essential to the human spirit.
During his presidency, he protected approximately 230 million acres of public land, establishing 150 national forests, 51 federal bird reservations, four national game preserves, five national parks, and 18 national monuments.
Women in the Woods
While Roosevelt’s dramatic expansion of public lands is well known, the role of women in American conservation deserves greater recognition.
Susan Fenimore Cooper, a student of her famous father, published Rural Hours in 1850 – a detailed natural history that influenced both Thoreau and the early conservation movement. Her careful observations helped Americans see local landscapes as worthy of preservation.
Marjory Stoneman Douglas fought to protect the Florida Everglades when most saw it as a worthless swamp. Her 1947 book The Everglades: River of Grass transformed public understanding of wetland ecosystems. She found that regular communion with nature sustained her through decades of advocacy work.
These leaders shared a practical approach to conservation, focusing on specific, achievable goals while maintaining remarkable equanimity in the face of opposition. Their work suggests that protecting nature and being protected by it can form a reciprocal relationship – the more we preserve wild spaces, the more they preserve something essential in us.
Dark Places
The path to peace often leads through our own shadows. While Americans preserve scenes of spectacular beauty, the relationship between nature and human resilience has been proven most powerfully in places of confinement and struggle. These dark places – prisons, exile, places of oppression – have paradoxically served as crucibles for some of humanity’s deepest insights about peace and connection to nature.
Nelson Mandela’s garden on Robben Island stands as a profound example. In the harsh environment of a maximum security prison, Mandela and his fellow prisoners created a garden in the courtyard where they crushed limestone. In his autobiography, he wrote: “A garden was one of the few things in prison that one could control. To plant a seed, watch it grow, to tend it and then harvest it, offered a simple but enduring satisfaction. The sense of being the custodian of this small patch of earth offered a small taste of freedom.”
This echoes the experience of Albie Sachs, who after surviving an assassination attempt that took his arm and the sight in one eye, found healing partly through his connection to the natural world. During his recovery, watching the ocean’s rhythms helped him develop the concept of his later book – Soft Vengeance – achieving justice through law rather than violence.
Martin Luther King Jr. often drew on natural imagery to maintain his equilibrium and express his vision during frequent detainment. From the Birmingham Jail, he wrote of the majestic heights of justice and used metaphors of storms and seasons to describe the civil rights struggle. His deep understanding of peace was shaped not just by moments of tranquility in nature, but by finding inner calm in places of confinement.
The Dalai Lama often speaks of how the Himalayas’ steady presence influenced Tibetan approaches to maintaining calm, even through decades of exile.
These experiences remind us that while we focus on America’s preserved wilderness spaces, the human need for connection to nature is universal. Peace is an American pursuit and a global birthright. When we protect natural spaces, we’re participating in something that transcends national boundaries – the preservation of humanity’s common sanctuary.
Paths to Peace
The leaders who shaped American conservation found different routes to and through nature. John Muir sought transcendent experiences, climbing trees in storms and walking thousands of miles in solitude. Gifford Pinchot, first chief of the U.S. Forest Service, took a more systematic approach, seeking balance between preservation and sustainable use. Rachel Carson combined meticulous scientific observation with poetic sensitivity to nature’s rhythms.
Their examples suggest there is no right way to find peace in nature. Some need solitude and silence. Others seek the raw tests of strengths and capacity, and find restoration in active engagement with the natural world. Some seek dramatic landscapes to ponder in awe, others find sufficient wonder in a city park or backyard garden.
Wild Wisdom
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his essay on Nature, “…in the woods, we return to reason and faith.” His words point to something profound about nature’s effect on human consciousness – how it seems to restore us not just to calm, but to our truest selves.
Modern research into nature’s calming effects – the lowered cortisol, the enhanced immune function, the restored attention – helps explain the mechanisms behind what people have long intuited. For those who find great equanimity through connection with nature, there also seems to be an innate genius in each of us that emerges more fully in wild spaces.
We might experience this as artistic, spiritual, or intellectual – and perhaps even more fundamental – a capacity for presence, for wonder, for sensing our connection to something larger than ourselves. It’s what Eleanor Roosevelt accessed on her morning walks, what John Muir celebrated in his rhapsodic nature writing, what Jane Goodall tapped into during her patient observations of primates in Gombe.
The preservation of wild spaces represents more than conservation of natural resources or recreational opportunities. It preserves access to this deeper part of ourselves – the part that knows how to find peace, that remembers how to wonder, that recognizes our belonging in the larger community of life.
These vintage postcards capture more than just scenic views. They record moments when people felt called to share their experience of wonder, to say to friends and family that the experience mattered. The fact that we’ve preserved and share these places, despite constant pressure to exploit them, suggests we recognize they offer something essential to human flourishing.
Why the woods? Because something in us comes alive there. Because in preserving wild spaces, we preserve the possibility of encountering our own wild wisdom, and these revelations are too precious not to protect for future generations.
Each time we step into nature – whether it’s a national park or a neighborhood green space – we participate in this legacy of preservation. We join a long line of people who recognized that human flourishing depends on maintaining connection to places where we might find peace and that help us face whatever challenges await when we return.
Old Faithful Inn stretches across the Yellowstone landscape, its distinctive roofline echoing the forested hills in a vintage linen postcard. Steam rises from the nearby geyser basin. The Civilian Conservation Corps built Yellowstone for their time and for future generations. In New York, a sister program blazed trails, too.
The story of our national parks is also a remarkable story of resilience and collaboration in hard times. Just as the national parks were becoming popular, the Depression brought unprecedented unemployment and bare scarcities at home, on the farm, and in cities. Leaders with optimistic vision were challenged to engage an illiterate and unskilled workforce or face severe cultural, social, and economic consequences.
The Civilian Conservation Corps’ work in Yellowstone exemplified an unprecedented partnership between federal agencies, orchestrated by a remarkable team. Robert Fechner, the program’s first director, brought his labor union experience to balance competing interests that might have limited the program. Harold Ickes, as Secretary of the Interior, ensured high standards for conservation work. The Department of Labor selected the men for service in the corps. The Army constructed and operated the camps. The National Park Service and Forest Service supervised the technical and construction work. This complex dance of bureaucracy somehow produced remarkable efficiency, with the CCC completing projects that had languished on drawing boards for decades.
Take the terraced formations of Mammoth Hot Springs, for example, their delicate travertine steps descending the hillside in nature’s own architecture. CCC workers constructed the stone steps and walkways that would allow visitors to safely view these natural wonders. The careful integration of human infrastructure with natural features became a hallmark of CCC work. Now known as ‘parkitecture’, the philosophy would influence park design for generations.
Long before the federal programs, Frances Perkins coordinated closely with Roosevelt during his New York state governorship to protect workers and grow the workforce. She had witnessed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, an experience that drove her lifelong commitment to worker safety and labor reform. As New York’s Industrial Commissioner from 1929 to 1933, Perkins pioneered unemployment relief programs and worker protections that would later shape New Deal policies. When Roosevelt became president, he named her Secretary of Labor – the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet – and she brought her New York experiences to Washington just in time.
Perkins understood the value of both job creation and job training, having seen their impact in New York. She helped shape the CCC, carefully navigating the political tensions around women’s employment programs. Her influence helped ensure that CCC and other programs included educational components, reflecting her belief that economic relief should build long-term capabilities, not just provide temporary aid. She also made sure the federal programs benefited her home state, and piloted important new programs there.
A 1905 hand-colored postcard of Watkins Glen in New York state shows Diamond Falls in the distance, framed by the narrow gorge’s layered rock walls. When the CCC arrived here in the 1930s, they found a park already famous for its natural beauty but in need of significant infrastructure. The Corps constructed the stone walkways that still guide visitors through the glen today, built overlooks at strategic points, and created a trail system that made the park’s dramatic features accessible while preserving their natural character.
The CCC’s work at Watkins Glen was particularly challenging given the varied landscape and unique natural formations. Jacob’s Ladder, a daunting stone staircase ascending the gorge wall, required precise engineering to integrate it naturally into the rock face. The Corps workers quarried stone and shaped the ascent, creating a path that appear to emerge organically from the cliff itself.
At Rainbow Falls, they constructed the “flying stairs” – suspended pathways that seem to float alongside the cascading water. This required not just skilled stonework but innovative engineering to ensure the structures could withstand the gorge’s frequent flooding and harsh winters. The Stairway to Lover’s Lane presented similar challenges, with workers having to carefully cut into the gorge wall while preserving its natural beauty.
The Corps also built the park’s amphitheater, transforming a natural hollow into a gathering space that would host generations of visitors for educational programs. Throughout these projects, workers had to move tons of stone while working in the confined space of the gorge. They developed specialized techniques for working in the narrow spaces, often suspended above the creek as they built pathways that had to withstand both regular flooding and freezing temperatures. The project showcased the Corps’ ability to combine heavy construction with delicate environmental consideration – skills that would prove valuable throughout the park system.
Yet while young men were building parks across America, another story was unfolding at Bear Mountain, New York. A smaller program called the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration (TERA) – nicknamed the She-She-She camps – was offering women their own opportunity for training and education. Eleanor Roosevelt championed this effort, collaborating closely with progressive educator Hilda Worthington Smith to create a program that emphasized both practical skills and broader education.
At Camp TERA, women learned furniture refinishing, bookbinding, typing, and business skills. They studied literature, current events, and public speaking. The curriculum reflected both practical needs and progressive educational ideals, emphasizing peer learning and leadership development. The camps created a college-like atmosphere, quite different from the military structure of CCC camps.
The economics of these programs tell their own story. Spending roughly $1,000 per enrollee annually (about $25,000 in today’s dollars) the CCC cost $3 billion over nine years – equivalent to about $60 billion today. In its time, the program returned an estimated $2.50 in measurable public benefits for every dollar spent. Each CCC enrollee earned $30 monthly, with $25 sent home to their families – enough to keep many families fed during the Depression’s darkest days. The TERA budget was much less and never achieved the scale that made the CCC so cost-effective, yet for some of the women who participated, the return on investment was significant in improving their health, caregiving capacities, and professional skill sets – many went on to careers in business, education, and public service.
The CCC employed three million men over nine years. TERA participants numbered just 8,500 women. Despite Eleanor Roosevelt’s advocacy and Frances Perkins’ support from the Labor Department, the women’s program expanded only briefly and never really got off the ground. The reasons echo familiar themes: limited funding, resistance to women working outside the home, and debates about appropriate roles for women in society.
These limitations weren’t unique to TERA. The CCC itself reflected America’s racial divisions, with segregated camps and discriminatory selection. Some local communities opposed Black CCC camps in their areas. The program’s focus on young, single men also excluded many who needed help.
Yet for all their limitations, the New Deal’s public works programs transformed America’s public spaces. Beyond the CCC and TERA, the Works Progress Administration built parks, schools, and community centers nationwide. WPA artists created murals that still enliven post offices and courthouses today. Collectively, WPA workers built communities, developed national infrastructure, and documented American life through photography and collected folk songs and stories that might otherwise have been lost.
The human legacy of these programs extends far beyond their physical achievements. Chuck Yeager, the pilot who would later break the sound barrier, learned mechanics in the CCC. Stan Musial developed his work ethic in a Pennsylvania CCC camp before becoming a baseball legend. Robert Mitchum and Raymond Burr worked in CCC camps before their Hollywood careers. From the TERA camps emerged teachers, business leaders, and community organizers who shaped their communities for decades to come.
Looking at these vintage postcards today, we can measure the value of these programs not just in the enduring infrastructure they created, but in the generational impact of providing education and opportunity to millions of Americans of modest means. Think of the families fed by CCC wages, the skills learned, the confidence built. Consider the children and grandchildren who grew up hearing stories of carving out Yellowstone’s trails or getting the chance to study at Bear Mountain, who inherited not just the physical legacy of these programs but their spirit of public service and possibility. Think of all of us today, who still climb the steps and set our sights on this same legacy.
The trails around Old Faithful, the stone steps at Watkins Glen, the walkways at Mammoth Hot Springs – all have weathered nearly ninety years now, crossed by millions of visitors. They stand as monuments not just to American craftsmanship, collaboration, and ingenuity but to the transformative power of public investment in both our spaces and our people. They give us examples of leadership and also remind us of the great many unknown men and women who preserved and protected the places we love. Their endurance challenges us to imagine what might be achieved in this generation if we again dared to think so boldly about developing our natural resources and our human potential together.
The Posted Past 