(MILITARY) Cook Charles Letter written by a Buffalo Soldier

Sale 2503 - Lot 328

Price Realized: $ 1,000

?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price

Estimate: $ 1,500 - $ 2,500

(MILITARY.) Cook, Charles. Letter written by a Buffalo Soldier at a post in Indian territory. Autograph Letter Signed to Anna [Payne] of Dodge City, KS. 3 pages, 8 x 5 inches, on one folding sheet of Cook's personal printed stationery; dampstaining. Fort Supply, Indian Territory, 5 January 1883

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Charles Cook (born circa 1857) was a soldier in the 24th Infantry Regiment, one of the famed "Buffalo Soldier" units in the United States Army consisting of African-American troops serving under white officers. He was a native of Loudoun County, VA, and enlisted in 1880. He wrote this letter from Fort Supply in what is now northwestern Oklahoma. Most of the letter is a plea for his sweetheart Anna's continued attention: "I tried not to write again until I heard from you again, but I am so attached to you, I could wait no longer for an answer. I am well in health, but your long delay in answering makes me feel very unwell in mind." He also discusses life in the regiment: "I am so fatigued I can hardly write. . . . You will see some gentlemen of my company in the city soon, for they started today to repair the telegraph line from this post to Dodge City." We know of no other Buffalo Soldier letters on the auction market.
Other letters from Cook to Anna Payne of Dodge City, KS are published in Schubert's Voices of the Buffalo Soldier: Records, Reports, and Recollections of Military Life and Service in the West, pages 123-6. Anna Payne (born circa 1863) never married, and appears in the census records for Dodge City through 1940.