From 1866 through World War II, the Buffalo Soldiers of the 9th and 10th U.S. Cavalry Regiments served the nation in peace and war, building a record that included the Indian Wars, the Spanish-American War, the Philippine Insurrection, the Mexican Expedition, and the European Theater in World War II. Fort Riley, established at a site recommended by John C. Fremont in 1852 to protect traffic on the Santa Fe and Oregon Trails, became central to that history when Col. Benjamin Grierson moved the 10th Cavalry headquarters there in August 1867 and completed its organization, and when the 9th Cavalry arrived from the Philippines in late 1922 as garrison troops for Fort Riley and the Cavalry School. Junction City, founded in 1858 at the junction of the Smoky Hill and Republican Rivers and closely tied to Fort Riley from its beginning, became part of a community where black soldiers found greater acceptance, while married noncommissioned officers of the 9th and 10th Cavalry lived first in Rileyville and later in brick quarters at Pawnee Place. The 9th Cavalry, organized in 1866 under Col. Edward Hatch, fought Native peoples across the West, battled bandits and illegal squatters, helped quell New Mexico's Lincoln County War in 1878, rescued Col. James W. Forsyth and elements of the 7th Cavalry at Drexel Mission in 1890, served in Cuba and the Philippines, guarded the U.S.-Mexican border, returned to Fort Riley in 1922, and was inactivated in North Africa on March 7, 1944. The 10th Cavalry, organized in 1866 under Col. Benjamin Henry Grierson amid discrimination and poor conditions, completed its formation at Fort Riley, rode to the aid of Maj. George A. Forsyth at Beecher's Island in 1868, spent decades fighting on the Great Plains while also building posts, stringing telegraph wire, mapping territory, locating water, and protecting travel and settlement, stormed and captured San Juan Hill during the Spanish-American War, later served in the Philippine Insurrection and the punitive expedition after Pancho Villa's 1916 attack on Columbus, New Mexico, and was inactivated in North Africa on March 20, 1944. Known as "Buffalo Soldiers," a name Native American tribes gave in respect for their tenacity and valor, these troopers served under severe hardship and widespread racial prejudice, yet contributed greatly to the nation, to Fort Riley, to Kansas, and to the social progress achieved by its people.