Every Coloradan should know the story of Buffalo Soldier John Taylor, who fought harder and longer than perhaps any man in our history to be truly free.

Taylor’s story stands out above all others in a thought-provoking exhibit about Buffalo Soldiers down at Fort Garland.

Taylor was a slave working on a plantation in Kentucky at the beginning of the Civil War when the Union offered him his freedom in exchange for becoming a soldier. Taylor jumped at the chance to join the first Black regiment in Kentucky. His unit fought one of the last battles of the  Civil War, the Battle of Petersburg, during which Taylor spoke of seeing death and suffering all around. “At times when the enemy were close, some of the Yankees ran,” Taylor told his children. “I didn’t run. I didn’t want to be a slave anymore.”                                      

After the war, the army established six all-Black cavalry and infantry regiments, the country’s first peacetime regular units. The regiment Taylor joined, the 38th Infantry, was sent out West to the front lines of the Indian Wars almost as soon as it was formed. 

This resulted in the very first contact between Black soldiers and American   Indians of the West. The Cheyenne soon called the Black men  “Buffalo  Soldiers,” purportedly because their hair resembled the curly hair of the buffalo.

A newly free man, Taylor was suddenly tasked with taking away the freedoms Native Americans had enjoyed for millennia in the West, flushing them from their native lands. He was assigned for a time to Fort Garland in Colorado.

A story in the Durango Herald captures the heartache of that dilemma for Taylor’s freedom-loving soul:

“The experience fighting Native Americans across Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and Colorado deeply affected Taylor, who longed for their nomadic freedom.”

When he was discharged from the army, Taylor quickly found kindred souls among the Indians, joining a roving band of Chiricahua Apache. Between 1870 and 1871, Taylor traveled with these Apaches into northern Mexico and sections of Arizona, Texas and New  Mexico.

“John was a wanderer of the barrancas,” according to a story in The Colorado Magazine, circa 1941, “riding with first one wild bunch and then another.”

He referred to this time of his life as his “wild riding days.”

Because of his interaction with a number of tribes, Taylor rapidly mastered a number of languages of the region, becoming a bridge between cultures. From the time of his discharge in 1870 to 1879, he learned the Spanish, Apache, Navajo and Ute languages so well that he became the official interpreter for Los Pinos Agency.

By some accounts Taylor married several native women during this time, often only for a short time before they put his belongings outside the teepee for some offense, signaling a divorce.

Taylor may have left the Chiricahuas in 1871 because of increasing tensions between settlers and Apaches, and he refused to choose sides.

“Although his role as a Buffalo Soldier and as a settler was to ‘spread the White Man’s civilization,’ Taylor persistently incorporated aspects of Indian civilization into his life through his multiple marriages into different tribes. He adopted not only their languages, but also the nomadic lifestyle of the Apaches, Navajos and Utes,” according to a narrative of his life in a thesis by Louis Gregory McAllister.

After losing his family to smallpox in 1871, he moved to Pine River Valley in southwest Colorado where he began trapping beaver on the Pine and Animas rivers. Later in life he repeatedly suggested that he was “the first White man to settle in Pine Valley.”

But the settled life didn’t take.

At some point between 1873 and 1876, “he left his traps and joined a band of ‘wild riding Navajo’,” according to an oral history cited by McAllister.

Taylor eventually joined the Southern Utes in 1877 when they were making  the transition from nomadic life to a reservation in southwestern Colorado.

That’s when things get a little complicated.

Taylor appeared with the Utes at several festivals, and on a trip to Colorado Springs, Taylor and his Ute friends posed in a photograph that portrayed Taylor as “a settler” being captured by Indians. Such reenactments were common in The Wild West Shows and circuses of the era.

Although he had married a Ute and had children who were Utes, he maintained that he was not a tribal member because he was “free,” according to an oral history cited in the exhibit. The fact that Utes had to have passes to leave the reservation most likely triggered Taylor’s memories of slavery. In Kentucky, African Americans had to carry passes or freedom papers whenever they traveled. He never carried a pass.

Taylor seems to have changed his identity and origin story depending on his audience. To Anglos, he was an early settler and frontier hero of Colorado, known as one of the founders of Ignacio, which was started on land Taylor had sold to the town fathers in 1910. He apparently inherited the land from one of his Indian wives, Polly Green, when she died.

To the Utes, he was “an adopted son,” fully integrated into the life of the reservation. In his golden years, he greatly contributed to helping the Southern Utes make the transition from nomadic life to life on the reservation. By the late 20th century, Taylor had at least 100 descendants in the Southern Ute tribe.

To the nearby town of Durango, however, he was a Black man, treated with disdain and prejudice all his days.

So who was John Taylor really? What does his apparently fluid identity tell us about our multicultural past?

It may take us years to figure that out, but the exhibit at Fort Garland, called “buffalo soldiers: reVision,” tries mightily.

The exhibit features the works of eight artists who try to collectively capture the multifaceted history of the period with the help of Buffalo Soldier scholars, descendants, community members and tribal partners. It’s worth a visit during Black History Month, or any month.

“This exhibition is grounded in the history and legacy of Buffalo Soldiers, but offers the artists’ and community reflections and interpretations on that history, especially in topics that aren’t necessarily covered in textbooks,” Eric Carpio, History Colorado’s chief community museum officer and director of Fort Garland Museum & Cultural Center, told me. “For example, one of the core themes of the exhibition is looking at the relationships between Buffalo Soldiers and Native Americans.”

The exhibit includes prints that layer historical photos and documents with contemporary drawings. Artists have also contributed poetry, posters, paintings, a video, letters and exhibits using period materials from Fort Garland. The kaleidoscope approach — made up of White, Native American, Black, male and female voices — is meant to accurately mimic the whole range of experiences of the Buffalo Soldiers era, and actually may be the best way to capture the many personalities of a very American American like John Taylor.

Carpio said there were moments of tension between the artists, “especially when you dig into issues that are personal, gender and history. The nice thing is people were open to feedback. Which I think is a model for how we should all operate.”

I actually think John Taylor had it right all along. Most of us Americans are mutts, we don’t have one single identity. We fit into multiple tribes depending on where we are standing, and that plurality is really what defines us most. Some days I am a native Coloradan; some days a Polish Catholic; most nights I’m a fully assimilated Nuggets fan, all other tribes be damned.

I am you and you are me; we are a country based on an idea, not an ethnicity. When we try to fit ourselves and other people into little boxes, we make everyone less free. Wearing our identities a bit loosely, like sports team jerseys, is what makes us truly American, I would argue. (I think John Taylor would have had absolutely no patience for identity politics.)

Through his decisions, Taylor somehow avoided those boxes and maintained his freedom his entire life.

“He did this by joining the Buffalo Soldiers to head out West, by marrying into a number of nomadic Indian tribes of the region, by allying with the Avikan Ute in their skirmishes, by rejecting tribal membership because it threatened his freedom as a U.S. citizen, and by his insistence upon being a White settler,” writes McAllister.

“John Taylor’s life remains a unique example of how an identity can be formed by the historical forces and the dynamics of location,” McAllister concludes.

More than anything, “John Taylor’s eventful life always reflected his struggle to remain free.”