There was a big stir in the press back in 1988 when Lee Young Jr. was made a Texas Ranger.

He was the first black man ever to pin on a Ranger badge, everybody said, the first black ever to be elevated to that elite and legendary corps.

But one of his friends just laughed. "Hell, you're not the first black Ranger," he said. "You're the first Indian Ranger." ' ,

Sgt; Young laughs, too, telling the story. "I like that," he says.

Actually, both the friend and the press were correct. Sgt. Young, who serves at the Texas Department of Public Safety station in Garland, is a Black' Seminole, a descendant of black people who refused to be slaves and became Indians instead.

"The old folks would tell us stories about them," Sgt. Young says. "About all we had, history-wise, was the stories that had been passed on from generation to generation. Just the old people talking about what they heard from their fathers and grandfathers. They were stories about their lives and the things they endured."

But one day not long ago in a secondhand bookstore, Sgt. Young picked up a volume about Indian scouts who had served with the U.S. Army. He opened it. There was a photograph of his great-grandfather, Benjamin July, standing with several other Black Seminoles, gazing solemnly at the camera.

"I bought the book," Sgt. Young says. "I took it home and showed it to my son. My son took it and showed it to his teacher. And the teacher said, 'We need to get your father over to speak to our class sometime.' "

What the children heard was a story not often told, of a fight for freedom that lasted more than 100 years, of an odyssey comparable to that of the Children of Israel from Egypt, and a proud history in danger of being forgotten, even by the descendants of those who lived it.

The odyssey ended on the West Texas frontier, at the place where the Rio Grande flows out of the Big Bend, meets the Pecos and Devil's River, and then resumes its journey south toward the Gulf of Mexico, the place where Del Rio and Brackettville now stand. It had begun more than a century earlier in the British colonies of Georgia and the Carolinas.

Early in the 18th century a few slaves were escaping from the cotton [sic. Rice] plantations in the colonies and making their way into Spanish Florida, where the dense jungles, high grass, venomous reptiles and clouds of insects gave them refuge. About the same time, remnants of the Creek Nation who a were unwilling to accept the white man's way fled to Florida, too.

The Creeks who stayed behind called these malcontents "seminole," which was their word for "runaway" or "rebel". Soon the runaway Creeks were thinking of themselves as a separate tribe. They got along better with their fellow fugitives than with their own kinsmen. They intermarried and formed alliances with the runaway Africans, who also started considering themselves Seminoles.

The slave owners were infuriated that just beyond their borders lived free black people raising their own cattle, riding their own horses, tending their own gardens, carrying guns and traveling long distances whenever they chose. Communities of free blacks so near by, they believed, would inspire other blacks to try to escape. If they were allowed to remain free, the Black Seminoles could become a threat to the whole slave system. But their former owners couldn't invade the Spanish colony to get them back.

In 1821, Spain---which had forbade slavery in its colonies---ceded Florida to the United States. Almost immediately, bands of Americans and Creeks launched expeditions from Alabama and Georgia to try to capture the escaped slaves and place into bondage the younger generations of Black Seminoles who had been born free. But, with the help of their Indian Seminole friends and their knowledge of the Florida wilderness, the blacks repulsed the invaders.

When Congress declared in.1830 that all Indians were to be removed to a reservation west of the Mississippi, the Creeks and the other "Civilized Tribes" of the East submitted and hit the "Trail of Tears" to Oklahoma. But the Seminoles, knowing their black relatives would go into bondage if they obeyed the law, refused to go. When the Army tried, first through negotiation and then by force, to separate the Indian Seminoles from their black friends and kinsmen, it succeeded only in igniting a bloody war.

After 11 years of unsuccessful fighting, Gen. William J. Worth, the commander at the time (and the man for whom Fort Worth later would be named), concluded that the Army couldn't whip the rebels.

"Ten resolute Negroes, with a knowledge of the country, are sufficient to desolate the frontier..." one of his aides warned. So the government told the Seminoles that if they would end their resistance, the blacks could go with them to Oklahoma.

In Oklahoma, the government, whose Indian policy was based on almost total ignorance of Indians, immediately blundered. It decided the Seminoles were merely a branch of the Creek Nation and settled them on the Creek reservation. The Creeks regarded them as subject to Creek government and laws, but the Seminoles considered themselves a separate nation.

They refused to submit to Creek authority.

Further more, the Creeks owned slaves and regarded the Black Seminoles as slaves. When dealing with whites, the Seminoles sometimes called their black relatives slaves, to keep them safe in a land where any free black could be captured and sold into servitude. But selling a black person was against Seminole law, and the Black Seminoles lived in their own villages and were governed by their own chiefs.

The Creeks tried to force the Seminole Nation to disarm its black people and treat them as slaves, but the Seminoles defied them just as they had defied the government. Then some of the Creeks claimed that they owned the Black Seminoles, and sold fraudulent titles to slave speculators.

When the Seminoles refused to turn over their black tribesmen to the speculators, Creeks and .white slave-catchers raided the black villages, captured some of the people and took them away to the slave markets.

Predictably, the U.S. government backed the slavers. "All the difficulties between individuals of the Creek and Seminole nations have grown out of the condition of these slaves," the Army reported to Washington, "and the Negro chiefs have exercised a controlling influence over the Seminoles and have induced them to resist the government and the laws of the Creek Nation. …All of the intelligent Creeks and licensed traders in the nation agree in the statement that these Negroes exercise a most pernicious influence over the Seminoles."

By the winter of 1849, a Seminole chief named Wlld Cat and a Black Seminole chief named John Horse were fed up with the Creeks and the government. Together with about 35 Indians and 30 blacks, they stole away from the reservation and crossed the Red River into Texas. In the spring, they crossed the Rio Grande into Mexico, where there was no slavery, and set up camp just south of the river.

A little later, about 200 more Black Seminoles, led by Jim Bowlegs, described by the Army as "an intelligent Negro," started to join Wild Cat and John Horse in Mexico, but an armed party of Creeks and slavers overtook and attacked them. Several Black Seminoles were killed, and most of the rest were herded back to the reservation. But a few escaped and continued on to Mexico. From time to

time others would jump the reservation and join them there.

One who made the trek was a teenager named Sampson July, who would become the grandfather of Miss Charles Wilson. She’s a retired schooltreacher who lives in Brackettville. She's 82 now.

"Wild Cat said to the Mexican government, "You just give us give us some corn and some guns and let us stay where we are, and we'll get rid of the Apaches and Comanches for you,''' Miss Wilson says. "Of course, he might have been drunk when he said it. He was a drunkard. He had a reputation for that. John Horse did, too. We would sit and listen to the old, people talk about them. We just listened and they talked. But the kids don’t listen now. They've thrown the history away."

The Mexican government gave the Seminoles permission to stay. In return, they protected the border from Comanches, Apaches and various mad Texans. who kept invading Mexico, hoping to establish an empire there. Wild Cat and John Horse were named colonels in the Mexican Army.

"Years later, they moved on farther south about 100 miles, around Nacimiento and Musquiz," Sgt. Young says. "They moved because they were in close proximity to the border, and slavers would cross the border and pick up anyone they wanted and bring them back and put them in bondage. They said, ‘Hey, we're too close to Texas. Let's move south.'"

The Seminoles, who eventually numbered a few hundred, proved to be excellent fighters, and they got along well with the Mexicans. But in 1859, a smallpox epidemic killed more than 50 members of the band, including Wild Cat. The Indian Seminoles quarreled over who should succeed him as their chief, and soon they began to drift back to Oklahoma. By 1861, nearly all the Indian Seminoles had left Mexico. But the Black Seminoles, still in danger of becoming slaves if they crossed the Rio Grande, remained.

When the Civil War ended the threat of slavery, some returned to the reservation in Oklahoma. Others moved closer to the Texas border. In 1870, the Army at Fort Duncan, near Eagle Pass, received a letter from the Secretary of War, authorizing "the employment of such a number of Indian-Negroes as may be found useful as scouts, provided no more than 200 are kept in service." A few months later, Maj. Zenas Bliss signed up the first seven members of the unit that would become known as the Seminole-Negro Indian Scouts, which would be headquartered at Fort Clark, near Brackettville.

They were in the Army, but they didn't look like soldiers. They dressed in modified Indian style. Some even wore buffalo-horn war bonnets into battle. They could speak both English and Spanish as well as their own language, English mixed with West African dialects, called Gullah. They knew the border country in which they were operating, and understood the ways of their enemies. They could find and follow trails that were a month old across hundreds of miles of desert and mountains. They could ride for days without water. In his reports, Maj. Bliss praised their dependability and described them as "excellent hunters and trailers, and brave scouts ... splendid fighters."

According to several military historians, never more than 50 Seminole-Negro Indian Scouts served in the Army at the same time. Only 116 in their entire history. But their impact on the Indian wars was immense. Some military historians credit them, more than any other Army unit, with the conquering of the Southwestern frontier.

Between 1873, when a young white lieutenant named John Bullis----who would become their most famous leader---took command of the scouts, and 1881, when the last Indian battle was fought in Texas, the Black Seminoles participated in 26 expeditions against the Comanches and Apaches, ranging from a few days to several months duration. In battle they often were outnumbered six or eight to one. Yet they never lost a man in battle. Never was one even wounded seriously.

After the battle at Palo Duro Canyon in 1874, which finally destroyed the might of Quanah Parker and his Comanches, one of the scouts, Pvt. Adam Paine, became the first of the group to receive the Medal of Honor, the country's highest military decoration.

Seven months later, on April 25, 1875, Lt. Bullis and three scouts----Sgt. John Ward, Trumpeter Isaac Payne, and a 16-year-old private named Pompey Factor----attacked a party of about 30 Comanches who had stolen a herd of cattle and were driving it through the desert. The Comanches were armed with Winchester repeating rifles. Concluding that four men with single-shot carbines were no match for such a force, the scouts mounted their horses and were fleeing when they glanced back and discovered that Lt. Bullis had lost his horse, and the Comanches were riding down upon him.

The three scouts rode back under heavy fire, rescued him and escaped. Sgt. Ward, Trumpeter Payne and Pvt. Factor became the second, third and fourth scouts to betawarded the Medal of Honor.

"Bullis and his scouts were quite close personally," University of Texas scholar Kenneth Wiggins Porter has written. "They were more like a large patriarchal family than an ordinary cavalry troop, and Bullis' relationship tothe scouts was more that of' a war chief to his braves than the conventional officer-men relationship. ... This relationship of mutual affection and confidence was inestimably important to the scouts' effectiveness as a fighting organization."

But they weren't treated so well by other whites.

The Black Seminoles believed the government had. promised to give them their own reservation in return for their service. But there was no written record of such an agreement, and despite the efforts of Lt. Bullis and a few other officers who admired the scouts, it never was honored.

And many white civilians along the border, still smarting from the South's loss of the Civil War, hated the Black Seminoles. Scouts caught alone were beaten by white gangs, and criminals led by the outlaw King Fisher murdered three of them in a two-year period.

In disgust, several of the Scouts, including Pompey Factor, returned to Mexico, where they had received better treatment, and continued to fight Indians under Col. Pedro Avincular Valdez.

Lt. Bullis eventually rose to the rank of brigadier general, but died in 1911, still a young man. Three years after his death, the Army disbanded the Seminole-Negro Indian Scouts and evicted them and their families from the military reservation at Fort Clark.

Miss Charles Wilson, who was 5 years old at the time, is the only Black Seminole still living who remembers their camp beside Las Moras Creek. "We lived in a house with a thatched roof and a dirt floor, like the Mexicans," she says. "Our living room had a board floor, and that's where we took our

company. It was the only house in the camp that had a room with a board floor. We were Mexican and Indian. I remember the metates that the women used to grind corn to make our bread."

The Black Seminoles were never given land of their own. Many of them returned to Mexico, as Pompey Factor had done. Others stayed in Texas and became cowboys. As late as 1939, one of the old scouts, Curley Jefferson, was still writing letters urging the government to grant the Black Seminoles some land or some money. His pleas were denied. The Bureau of Indian Affairs had closed the roIls of the Seminole Nation while the Black Seminoles were still in Mexico, and the blacks weren't included on the official list of the tribe. As Indians, the Black Seminoles didn't exist.

Mr. Jefferson was the last of the Seminole-Negro Indian Scouts to die, in 1959.

No matter what color you are, you're part of the culture you're raised in," Lee Young says. "We who were born and raised in that part of the country down there around . Brackettville and Del Rio, we aren't completely black, and we aren't completely Indian, either. We're a mixture of black and Indian and Mexican. I was raised up speaking Spanish, eating Mexican food, listening to Mexican music. But predominantly, my culture is Indian. That's the way I was raised and taught to do things."

Sgt. Young has always been proud of that culture, he says. When he was a child, his idols were the Lone Ranger and Tonto. "I identified with Tonto," he says. .

But not all Black Seminoles have been so proud of their heritage. "When I was small and they told me I was Seminole Indian, I was really ashamed of it," says Lily Mae Dimery. '''Don't call me Iridian!' I'd say. 'I'm not no Seminole!' The way they talked, the Gullah language that they used, my dad tried to teach it to me, but I didn't want it. I was ashamed of it. I didn't know what the history was, what we had, what it was all about."

Mrs. Dimery, who is 71, is standing with her husband, Louis, and her inlaws, Art and Carol Dimery, in the Seminole Scout Cemetery a few miles outside Brackettville, near the site of the scouts' old camp. She's gazing at the tombstone of Carolino Warrior, her grandfather. Nearby stands the tombstone of John Shields, the grandfather of the Dimery brothers.

"But it's a thing to be proud of," Mrs. Dimery says, "I just didn't know that then."

Louis Dimery moved away from Brackettville for 30 years and lost contact with his history, too, until he returned in 1972. "Then Miss Charles and Willie, they started talking to me about it," he says.

"Miss Charles," is Miss Charles Wtlson, who taught all the Black Seminole children of the Dimerys' generation in a one-room schoolhouse. "Willie" is William Warrior, Lily Mae Dimery's cousin, who works for a trucking company and serves as a reserve deputy sheriff in Del Rio.

"When I was little, I didn't know nothing about the Seminoles," says Carol Dimery. "But Miss Charles, when we was in school, she would tell us stories about them, and we would say, 'Well, tell us more.' But it just went in one ear and out the next. Now that time is going by, she's telling us more, and we're remembering it this time."

When the Brackettville schools were desegregated in 1960, the Seminole Indian Scout Association---a group that Miss Wilson and Mr. Warrior and the Dimerys helped organize---bought their old school building and grounds. "We wanted to keep it for ourselves, because our parents worked so hard to get it for us," Miss Wilso sys. Big photographs of Seminole-Negro Indian Scouts hand on the wall near her old school bell.

Now black Seminoles return to the school from all over the United States and Mexico twice a year to celebrate their history. "We have a celebration on Juneteenth (June 19)," Miss Wilson says, "but that’s to honor those Negroes who were slaves. We were not slaves. And since we started our organization and are trying to get our people back, we have what we call ‘Seminole Days" the third weekend in September. We dance. We sing the old songs. We wear our long Seminole dresses and our turbans. I tell you, we have a good time. On Sunday we go to the cemetery and have a service in memory of the scouts."

She sighs. "I think the Seminole culture is dying, though, even in Mexico. There are very few of the original Seminoles left down there, because of inter-marrying with the Mexicans. That’s why the older ones like me are trying to pass something on to the kids."

But much has been lost, she says, because the Black Seminoles always have been reluctant to talk about their lives and history.

"I didn’t hear much about the scouts after we left the camp," she says. "The older people just dien’t open up. It was their upbringing, I guess. Maybe it’s the Indian in them. But after I retired from teaching, I became interested in our history. I give talks here and there. And Willie’s getting to the place where he’ll open up."

Willie Warrior is 64 years old. He wears the Western hat and boots befitting a lawman on the Rio Grande. When he was in grade school, Miss Wilson was his teacher, and in 1945 he was one of the first two black students to graduate from the 12th grade in Brackettville.

Mr. Warrior is the grandson of Carolino Warrior and the nephew of Curley Jefferson, the last of the scouts to die, and he's a mine of information. He owns a big briefcase stuffed with photographs and documents, and can spin tales for hours.

One by one, he pulls the pictures and the papers from the case and tells a story about each: "When John Warrior enlisted in the service, he stammered. When they asked him his name, he couldn't get it all out. He said, 'John Warr... Warr... Warr...' So they wrote him down as 'Ward.' He's buried next to his father, Tony Warrior.

"Back in Florida, everybody had just one name. Like 'July,'" he says. "But it was in Spanish. It was ‘Julio.’ And my great-grandfather was 'Guerrera,' which means 'Warrior.' 'Guillermo Guerrero' is my name in Spanish. John Horse's name was 'Juan Caballo.'

''You take a black kid or an Anglo kid and raise him in Mexico, he's going to be a Mexican," he says. ''You raise him as an Indian, he's going to be an Indian. It’s where you’re raised, and who you're raised with. Down here on the border, everything bleeds into one."

He pauses for a drink of whiskey. He says he wishes more people would listen. ''We try to teach the young ones," he says, "but they don't want to learn. We try to make them understand, but they don't care.

"There were some Seminoles' who were neverr slaves, you know. My father traced back our family history, and he could not find a generation of Warriors who had ever been slaves,,,,"

Willie Warrior opens up, deep into the night, telling the stories.