Actors Meagon Williams, Gabe Moses and Brian Bond strike a pose with slingshots Saturday morning at the Bloomsburg Library. The trio is the cast of ‘Park Protectors: The Story of the Buffalo Soldiers and the National Park Service,’ and this scene early in the show points to the fact that Buffalo Soldiers fought in the Civil War, on the side of the North.
Mark Guydish | Times Leader
Black regiments became early park protectors
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Taking on the persona of a Buffalo Soldier, Meagon Williams reads aloud from a letter the soldier has written to his fiancee, Annabelle, back home.
Mark Guydish | Times Leader
Momentarily donning a stovepipe hat similar to what Abraham Lincoln would have worn, actor Brian Bond declares that the Emancipation Proclamation freed all the slaves in the United States as of Jan. 1, 1863.
Mark Guydish | Times Leader
Actor Gabe Moses presents to the audience a map of territories where indigenous people, from Comanche to Apache to Shawnee, lived during the 1800s. Some of this land eventually would be set aside as national parks.
Mark Guydish | Times Leader
Marching is part of a soldier’s life, as Meagon Williams, Brian Bond and Gabe Moses demonstrate in the BTE Theatre in the Classroom show.
Mark Guydish | Times Leader
Children from the audience hold pictures of branches and flowers to represent the many species that can be found at national parks.
Mark Guydish | Times Leader
Dante Green, who participated in Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble projects as a youth, is the writer and director of ‘Park Protectors: The Story of the Buffalo Soldiers and the National Park Service.’
Mark Guydish | Times Leader
Trudge, trudge, trudge.
In their role as Buffalo Soldiers turned park rangers, three actors hinted what it would have been like, back in 1899, to journey for 16 days from San Francisco to the area that would become Yosemite National Park.
“Are we there yet?” Meagon Williams asked cast mates Brian Bond and Gabe Moses, using a tone of voice that probably was familiar to many of the 80 kids and parents in the audience at the Bloomsburg Public Library last weekend.
“No,” came the answer.
“How about now?”
“Not even close.”
Eventually the trio reached Yosemite where Black troops — nicknamed Buffalo Soldiers by Native Americans because of their courage and the way their hair resembled the hair between a buffalo’s horns — built roads and trails, fought forest fires, and protected the land from poachers and illegal loggers.
In effect they were park rangers before the U.S. government officially used the term.
For its latest Theatre-in-the-Classroom project, the Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble has created a lively, 45-minute program called “Park Protectors: The Story of the Buffalo Soldiers and the National Park Service.”
Teachers, administrators and parent-teacher groups are invited to arrange for the touring show to perform at their schools, now through May 26. (Contact Paula Henry via email at phenry@bte.org or by phone at 570-458-4075.)
As with previous Theatre-in-the-Classroom productions, the interactive show is fast-paced with three cast members taking on multiple personas.
At one moment during the preview show at the library, Bond donned a stove pipe hat, a la Abraham Lincoln, to announce the Emancipation Proclamation of Jan. 1, 1863.
In another scene, the cast pantomimed a shootout and an outlaw stole a “gee-tar,” to show just how wild the Wild West could be.
All three cast mates turned into a family when Moses and Williams depicted the parents of Charles Young, a baby born into slavery in 1864 Kentucky but raised in freedom in Ohio.
“Do I have to go to school?” Bond asked, portraying a youthful Charles.
“Education is important,” Williams told him. “Especially for people who look like us.”
“You heard your mother,” Moses chimed in. “Now run along.”
As the actors told their audience, Charles Young graduated from his integrated high school at age 17, at the top of his class. They explained what “integrated” means, for the benefit of the kids who might not know there was ever a time when people of different races didn’t learn together.
Young later became the third Black man to graduate from West Point Military Academy — after, as Bond pointed out, “five long years of bullying from peers and teachers.”
Under Young’s leadership Buffalo soldiers took care of the country’s first national parks, including Sequoia and Yosemite.
Their work included the construction of trails and roads, which gave Williams the chance to portray a nay-sayer, scoffing at the idea that anyone could provide access to the towering, 14,000-feet-high Mt. Whitney.
Each time her character said something negative, Moses and Bond responded with a hearty “Just watch us! Ha!”
Later, children from the audience came forward to stretch out their arms and help the actors show how big a sequoia tree can grow — “Five times taller than the library!” Moses told them.
Kids also posed with pictures of flowers and leaves to show the kinds of trees and shrubs protected at the 100-acre Yosemite Arboretum the Buffalo Soldiers constructed in 1904.
After the preview, “Park Protectors” author and director Dante Green, who had taken part in BTE stage plays when he was growing up, said he hopes the Theatre-in-the-Classroom presentation helps people appreciate the role of those Buffalo Soldiers/park protectors — and he hopes it inspires more people of all races to visit and appreciate the country’s 424 national parks.
“They belong to all of us,” he said.