From Buffalo Soldier to Bath Attendant: The Story of Hugh Hayes and Hot Springs National Park

By Daniel Chmill, PhD

Hugh Hayes, Buffalo Soldier and Bath Attendant; date unknown.

Courtesy of Kelly Reese

In 1910, a man named Hugh Hayes wrote a letter to Harry Hallock, the medical director at the Hot Springs Reservation in Arkansas. Hallock had recently created a stringent new examination process for a group of employees called bath attendants. These men and women administered thermal water mineral baths to patients from across the country who came to Hot Springs seeking a cure to their ailments.

The reason for the letter was simple: Hayes, while working as an attendant in Hot Springs for the past decade, was concerned he would be unable to pass these new exams. Years earlier a horse fell on him, leaving Hayes “a little lame in one foot.”¹ The location and occupation of Hayes’ accident made this admission more significant, however. He injured himself at Fort Assiniboine in Montana as a member of the 10^th United States Cavalry Regiment. Hugh Hayes was a Buffalo Soldier.

10th Cavalry Escort to General Merritt's Party, St. Mary, Montana; c. 1894.

Courtesy of Montana State Library

As a Buffalo Soldier, he and his all-Black regiment navigated a segregated army while simultaneously participating in Anglo settler expansion through a systematic process of Indian removal in the American West. Hayes and the 10^th Cavalry also served in the Spanish American War, where the Black men fought alongside Theodore Roosevelt and his “Rough Riders” in Cuba.

After his military career, Hayes began a new one at Hot Springs National Park. He visited Hot Springs in the 1890s and witnessed the opportunities present for African American men and women working as bath attendants. These individuals fueled the bathing industry in Hot Springs and made lucrative livings as indispensable members of bathhouse businesses. Hayes’ time in Hot Springs brought him in contact with some of the more influential African American citizens in the town.

Hugh Hayes was an ordinary man who participated in extraordinary moments in history. His story not only serves as an example of singular achievements through systemic challenges, but it also connects the history of Hot Springs National Park to seemingly unrelated moments in American history.

“Ready and Forward”: Becoming a Buffalo Soldier

Hugh Hayes was born on October 11, 1877. While he was able to read and write, Hayes did not attend school in his hometown of Dresden, Tennessee. On May 25, 1896, Hayes enlisted in the Army at age 18. He was assigned to the 10^th Colored Cavalry, I Troop. Hayes was joining a regiment with an already storied past.

The Army created the 10^th Cavalry in 1866 at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The 9^th and 10^th Cavalry, as well as the 38^th, 39^th, 40^th, and 41^st Infantry regiments were products of the 175,000+ African American men who fought for their freedom during the Civil War. The 10^th Cavalry’s motto was “Ready and Forward” With the men performing many frontier duties such as protecting mail routes, building roads, and locating natural resources like drinking water.

"The Sign Language." Caricature appearing in the Century Illustrated Monthly in April, 1889 portraying a Buffalo Soldier communicating with an American Indian.

Frederic Remmington

This motto propelled the regiment through many ugly encounters in the 1870s-1890s. The 10^th Cavalry, according to the U.S. Army, “protect[ed] settlers in areas plagued by bandits, Mexican revolutionaries, outlaws and bands of renegade Indians.”² This project involved campaigns of violent Indian removal to ensure empty, habitable land for Anglo settlers throughout the American West in places like Kansas, Texas, and New Mexico. Indigenous groups like the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, and Apache resisted the 10^th Cavalry and others but were ultimately defeated through overwhelming force and violence.

The romantic myths surrounding the Buffalo Soldiers are complicated. Confronted by a rapidly segregated and violent society for African Americans in the late nineteenth century, these men found a semblance of freedom and independence in the Army. But they found that independence in a system designed to erase Indigenous groups from their ancestral homelands.³

Military officers gathered at Fort Assiniboine, Montana, in 1896. Lieutenant John Pershing is in the front row, second officer from the right.

Courtesy of Montana State Library

When Hugh Hayes joined the ranks of the 10^th Cavalry, they were stationed in Fort Assiniboine in Montana. During his time, part of the regiment was led by Lieutenant John Pershing, one of the more famous members of the armed services at the turn of the twentieth century. Before leading the American Expeditionary Forces as a general in Europe during World War I, Lieutenant Pershing led Troop H of the 10^th Cavalry against the Cree Indians, forcing them across the Canadian border in the late 1890s. Pershing later wrote that “as I look back I can but feel that the associations with the splendid officers and men of the 10^th Cavalry were of the greatest value to me.” Pershing earned the nickname “Black Jack” for his command of African American troops and the name stuck with him for his entire military career.⁴

On September 17, 1897, Hugh Hayes’ horse fell on him during routine cavalry exercises. It was at this point that Hayes first encountered Hot Springs, Arkansas. Major W. H. Carter, Army surgeon at Fort Assiniboine, noted that even after four months, there remained “more or less swelling, stiffness and pain in both knee joints” for the Black private.⁵ Carter ordered Hayes to the Army and Navy General Hospital in Hot Springs, Arkansas. The establishment was built by the War Department and opened in 1887. Senator and former Civil War general John A. Logan took the waters at Hot Springs and benefited from his treatment there. He helped secure appropriations in Congress for the hospital, the first of its kind built during peacetime in American history. The facility offered soldiers, sailors, and veterans treatments where they would benefit by using the thermal water of the Hot Springs Reservation.

Postcard of the U.S. Army and Navy General Hospital in Hot Springs, Arkansas.

Hot Springs National Park Archives

Hugh Hayes was admitted to the Army and Navy Hospital on February 11, 1898. An assistant surgeon diagnosed him with Traumatic Synovitis, an extreme inflammation of the membrane that lines the joints. His prescription? Hayes took a thermal water bath every day for 10 minutes. He also received a pressurized jet of water, called a douche, on the affected joints, as well as a massage. Like his time in active duty, Hayes was segregated from white enlisted men in the facility’s wards. His patient file shows that his condition was marked as “improving” throughout the month of March. And when Hayes was discharged on April 8, 1898, Major Surgeon H. O. Perley noted the patient was “cured.”⁶ Hayes was ready to return to his regiment.

The Spanish-American War

While Hugh Hayes recovered in a hospital bed, the U.S.S. Maine exploded in Havana, Cuba, on February 15, 1898. Officials in the United States used the event to enter a war with Spain for control of territories in the Western Hemisphere. Individuals in and out of the War Department believed, in an era dominated by Eugenics and medical knowledge mixed with racial difference, that African American soldiers could handle the tropical climates of Cuba better than their white counterparts.⁷

Hugh Hayes rejoined the 10^th Cavalry after they relocated from northern Montana to Chickamauga, Georgia, to train for their role in Cuba. In the South, many white residents were anxious and threatened seeing African American soldiers “armed with pistols, sword bayonets, and circled with cartridge belts, with every thimble filled with cartridges.” Racial confrontations ensued during the regiment’s two-month training stint in Georgia.⁸

Illustration of The Battle of Guasimas near Santiago June 24th, 1898. The 9th and 10th Colored Cavalry in support of the Rough Riders.

Courtesy of the Library of Congress

It does not appear Hayes fully recovered from his injuries as he remained in the United States to serve as a reserve force and ensure supply lines remained intact.⁹ In Cuba, the 10^th Cavalry served as the leading edge during the most significant fighting on the island, participating in battles at Las Guasimas, El Caney, as well as Kettle Hill and San Juan Hill. At San Juan Hill, the 10^th Cavalry reestablished positions after a chaotic charge by Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Rider regiment of the 1^st Volunteer Cavalry. Roosevelt described the victory as a “very great confusion” with “different regiments being completely intermingled – white regulars, colored regulars, and Rough Riders.”¹⁰

Roosevelt initially dismissed the skill and courage of the Buffalo Soldiers, calling them “shirkers in their duties.” He was quickly rebuffed by 10^th Cavalry Trooper Presley Holliday, calling Roosevelt’s assessment “uncalled for and uncharitable.”¹¹ Roosevelt appeared to change his stance by the time he was President of the United States. Delivering a speech in 1903, Roosevelt said, “I fought beside the colored troops of the 9^th and 10^th Cavalry. If a man is good enough to have him shot at while fighting beside me under the same flag, he is good enough for me to try to give him a square deal in civil life.”¹² Subsequent scholars have highlighted the significance of the 10^th Cavalry in American successes in Cuba.

Headline from the Chattanooga Daily Times, 12 October 1898

Chattanooga Daily Times

While newspapers heralded the work of the 10^th Cavalry in Cuba, with one editor proclaiming, “we are proud of our colored troops, the heroes of the day,” Black troops faced familiar hostilities from whites when they returned home.¹³ Stationed in Huntsville, Alabama, after the war, shooting broke out between the 10^th Cavalry and local officers. Newspaper accounts reported “The white soldiers here entertain a very bitter feeling against the negro troopers and it is feared trouble will occur whenever the two races meet.”¹⁴ After enduring race-based hostilities and violence in places like Huntsville, Hugh Hayes and the rest of the 10^th Cavalry returned to Montana in 1899. Hayes’ lingering injuries ultimately made him unfit for military service. He was discharged on February 13, 1899 due to “disability.”¹⁵

Working as a Bathhouse Attendant

It is unknown how or why Hugh Hayes returned to Hot Springs around 1903, but his stay at the town’s Army and Navy General Hospital likely introduced him to the opportunities open to an African American man in town. In 1898, bathhouse attendants, according to Hot Springs’ Superintendent William Little, “are well paid for the labor performed as any other class of people.”¹⁶ By the beginning of the twentieth century, African American bathhouse attendants made themselves indispensable parts of the bathing industry in Hot Springs. They began to organize to protect their pay and professions from exploitation. And in 1903, residents secured the first bathhouse used exclusively by African Americans.

Hugh Hayes began working as a bath attendant at the Park Hotel Bathhouse, an establishment with a national reputation. By the early 1900s, Hot Springs Reservation situated itself as the nation’s premier thermal water health resort. Publicity for Hot Springs’ bathhouses appeared in local and national medical journals across the country. The Park Hotel advertised itself to the elite class of patients and patrons who visited Hot Springs, sporting rooms lit by electric light. It also declared it had “THE MOST ELEGANT BATH HOUSE IN THE COUNTRY” with some of the latest hydrotherapy treatments of the era like needle showers and electric baths.¹⁷ Hayes and and his fellow bath attendants offered thousands of baths to visitors at the Park Hotel. For example, in 1907, the bathhouse provided 22,404 baths, just under the average of 27,764.

Postcard of the Park Hotel in Hot Springs, Arkansas; date unknown.

Hot Springs National Park Archives

Bathhouse employees who were influential members of the Black community served as Hugh Hayes’ coworkers. To apply hydrotherapy treatment to patients in the bathhouses, the Park Hotel needed a knowledgeable staff. One of the Park Hotel’s oldest employees was a man named Napoleon Rowell. Rowell was born enslaved in North Carolina and worked in the bathing industry after moving to Hot Springs in 1872. The Park Hotel used Rowell’s likeness in many of their promotional materials. He also worked to secure a site for African Americans to bathe in the same thermal waters as white visitors.

John T. T. Warren, 1919.

Clement Richardson, The Cyclopedia of the Colored Race

Hayes certainly worked alongside John T. T. Warren in the Park Hotel’s Bathhouse. Warren had “been an attendant at the Park Hotel Bath House practically ever since it was opened,” according to reservation superintendent Harry Myers in 1911.¹⁸ Warren’s work in the bathhouse gave him the capital to operate the town’s African American undertaking service. In the National Cyclopedia of the Colored Race, the editor noted in 1919 that “In spite of his many financial interests, and the numberless calls on his time,” Warren “was never too busy to respond to requests for assistance in forwarding the interests of his fellow citizens.”¹⁹ He was active in both local and national politics, speaking as a member of the Republican Party and dozens of Black fraternal organizations.

With this infrastructure and workforce, Hugh Hayes quickly learned how to excel in Hot Springs’ bathing industry. It does not appear that Hayes lived permanently in Hot Springs between 1903 and 1910. He traveled back and forth between his hometown of Dresden, Tennessee, a town near the Missouri Pacific railway lines that ran through Hot Springs. Hayes worked during the peak season in Hot Springs (January – May) and then returned home. During his stint as a bath attendant, Hayes learned the latest treatments in hydrotherapy, telling Director Hallock in his 1910 letter that he had studied literature from Dr. John H. Kellogg, director of the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan.²⁰

The Little-Barr Sanitarium in Dresden, Tennessee; c. 1910

Hot Springs National Park Archives

Like many African American men and women after him, Hayes took the newfound medical knowledge he developed at the Hot Springs Reservation and applied that skill and expertise outside of the city. By 1910, he was managing a bathhouse at the Little-Barr Sanitarium in Dresden. Doctors Little and Barr served as the county health officers while Hayes worked in the bathhouse. Despite Medical Director Harry Hallock’s response to Hayes’ October 1910 letter informing him “so far as I am able to determine from your letter, you will pass the physical examination,” there is no record of Hugh Hayes in Hot Springs after 1910.²¹

Ad written by Hugh Hayes in the December 6, 1918, Dresden Enterprise and Sharon Tribune.

Dresden Enterprise and Sharon Tribune

After the Battles and Bathhouses

Hayes remained in Dresden, Tennessee, throughout the 1910s and 1920s. He took up a career as a presser, ironing clothes and preparing other textiles. He used his eventful past to attract customers. In December 1918, as officers and enlisted men returned from Europe at the end of World War I, Hayes placed an ad “To the Boys Back from Service” in his local newspaper, saying, “Bring your clothes to the old Spanish-American war veteran, who soldiered with Gen. Pershing in the famous fighting Tenth Cavalry.”²² Hayes ultimately became manager of the City Steam Pressing Club in Dresden.²³

Health Problems plagued Hugh Hayes in the latter years of his life. In 1927, he travelled to Danville, Illinois, and made the first of many visits to the U. S. National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers. Hayes continued to receive treatment for the arthritis that plagued him since his cavalry mishap in 1897. It appears Hayes moved to Illinois at some point for more routine trips to the soldiers’ hospital. On October 10, 1940, Hugh Hayes died.

Hugh Hayes' gravesite at the Soldiers' and Airmen's Home National Cemetery in Washington, D.C.

Army Cemeteries Explorer, U.S. Army

In one final connection, Hayes was interred at the U. S. Soldiers’ and Airmen’s Home National Cemetery in Washington, D.C. Buried nearby is John Logan, the Civil War general and senator from Illinois whose support in the healing potential of Hot Springs’ thermal water helped fund the Army and Navy General Hospital; the very place Private Hugh Hayes received treatment and was introduced him to Hot Springs, Arkansas, the national park, and the opportunities it could provide an African American veteran.

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Hot Springs National Park’s thermal waters attracted individuals from all walks of life. Some came to bathe in the supposed healing waters. Others, specifically African American men and women, carved out a life of service in Hot Springs by administering the waters to patients and patrons. Hugh Hayes lived a life of service. He was a Buffalo Soldier, serving in a role that gave him a sense of independence and freedom within a society where those essential rights were often withheld. He then joined a fraternity of bathhouse workers who fueled the growth of the oldest unit in the entire national park system. The thermal waters flow through the story of Hugh Hayes and millions of other stories near and far from Hot Springs, Arkansas.

Endnotes

1. Hugh Hayes to Harry Hallock, 26 October 1910, HOSP 19266, Hot Springs National Park Collection, Box 43, Series II: Concessions Records, 1879-1998, Folder 1: Bath Attendants – Training, 1910-1913, Hot Springs National Park Archives, Hot Springs, AR.

2. United States Army, “Buffalo Soldiers,” U.S. Army at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, https://home.army.mil/leavenworth/application/files/2014/9979/5878/PAO-Buffalo-Soldier-Info.pdf

3. For more on the mythmaking of the Buffalo Soldiers, see Frank N. Schubert, “Buffalo Solders: Myths and Realities,” Army History 52 (Spring 2001): 13-18; Greg Martin, “Let’s Talk Honestly About Fort Missoula & Buffalo Soldiers,” 4 April 2022, Medium, accessed 25 November 2023, https://medium.com/@gregmartin_76328/lets-talk-honestly-about-fort-missoula-and-buffalo-soldiers-ef3d4190da8d

4. Richard O’Connor, “‘Black Jack’ Of The 10^th,” American Heritage 18, Issue 2 (February 1967), accessed November 30, 2023, https://www.americanheritage.com/black-jack-10th

5. W. H. Carter, Major and Surgeon, U. S. Army, to Surgeon and Commanding officer Army & navy General Hospital, Hot Springs, Arkansas, 8 February 1898, Record Group (RG) 112.5.1, Records of the Office of the Surgeon General of the Army, Records of Army and Navy General Hospital, Hot Springs, AR, Entry AR-6, Case Files, 1890-1913, “Hayes, Hugh,” National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Fort Worth, TX.

6. H. O. Perley, Patient File, “Hayes, Hugh,” NARA Fort Worth, TX.

7. LTC Roger D. Cunningham, USA Ret., “The Black ‘Immune’ Regiments in the Spanish-American War,” The Army Historical Foundation, accessed 11/30/2023, https://armyhistory.org/the-black-immune-regiments-in-the-spanish-american-war/

8. “Negro Troopers,” Chattanooga Daily Times, 24 April 1898, 4.

9. Herschel V. Cashin and Others, Under Fire with the Tenth U. S. Cavalry (New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1969), 348.

10. Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders (New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899), 139.

11. Charles Young Buffalo Soldiers National Monument, “Buffalo Soldiers in the Spanish-American War,” National Park Service, accessed 11/20/2023, https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/busospanamwar.htm

12. “The Square Deal,” Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University, accessed 11/30/2023, https://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Learn-About-TR/TR-Encyclopedia/Politics%20and%20Government/The%20Square%20Deal

13. Willard B. Gatewood, Jr., “Smoked Yankees” and the Struggle for Empire, Letters from Negro Soldiers, 1898-1902 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1987), 8; in “Buffalo Soldiers and the Spanish-American War,” Presidio of San Francisco National Historic Landmark District, accessed 25 November 2023, https://www.nps.gov/prsf/learn/historyculture/buffalo-soldiers-and-the-spanish-american-war.htm

14. “A Battle at Huntsville,” Chattanooga Daily Times, 12 October 1898, 2.

15. “Hugh Hayes, 22726” The National Archives in Washington, DC; Washington, DC, USA; Historical Register of National Homes for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers, 1866-1938; Series: M1749.

16. William J. Little, Report of the Superintendent of the Hot Springs Reservation (Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office, 1898), 945.

17. Ad for the Park Hotel, Hot Springs, AR, Hot Springs Medical Journal 2, no. 12 (December 15, 1893), 2.

18. Harry H. Myers to Secretary of the Interior, 21 September 1911, “Crystal Bathhouse” Microfiche Collection, Hot Springs National Park Archives.

19. Clement Richardson, editor, The National Cyclopedia of The Colored Race, Volume One (Montgomery, AL: National Publishing Company, 1919), 382.

20. Hayes to Hallock, 26 October 1910, HOSP 19266, Box 43, Folder 1, Hot Springs National Park Archives; see also J. H. Kellogg, M. D., Rational Hydrotherapy: A manual of The Physiological and Therapeutic Effects of Hydriatic Procedures, and the Technique of Their Application in the Treatment of Disease (Philadelphia: F. A. Davis Company, 1902).

21. Harry Hallock to Hugh Hayes, 31 October 1910, HOSP 19266, Box 43, Folder 1, Hot Springs National Park Archives.

22. Hugh Hays, “To the Boys Back from Service:,” Dresden Enterprise and Sharon Tribune, 6 December 1918, 5.

23. “Cleaning and Pressing,” Dresden Enterprise and Sharon Tribune, 28 May 1920, 5.