Buffalo Soldiers in Hawai'i
from National Park Service (excerpt)
Congress formed all-Black military regiments in 1866. Though officially called the 9th and 10th Cavalry and the 24th and 25th Infantry, they were also known as the
Buffalo Soldiers, as they served mainly in the West. In one example of their feats, troops from the 25th Infantry built the Mauna Loa Trail in what is now Hawai'i
Volcanoes National Park.
(1) The 25th Infantry, comprised of about 850 enlisted men and officers, arrived in Honolulu on January 14, 1913. The morning after their arrival they began a two-day,
twenty-three-mile march to Schofield Barracks where they were stationed until 1917.
(2) Newspaper articles describe how the soldiers were viewed by Hawai'i's multicultural society--although they did not encounter the racial hatred that they had from
communities on the mainland, they did not entirely escape prejudice here. The black troops remained segregated from their white counterparts.
(3) Positive cross-cultural relationships began as the troops marched in local parades and competed with civilian sports leagues in track and field and baseball. They
Read the excerpt from paragraph 11.
You can still hike sections of the original path built by these trailblazers (in many senses of the word) along the Northeast Rift Zone of Mauna Loa today.
How does the word trailblazer shape and refine the central idea?
OA. by contradicting the idea that the men were there to enjoy a vacation and short break from the building of the trail
OB. by building on the idea that the men were soldiers who volunteered to build the Mauna Loa Trail
O C.
by providing a purely literal description of the soldiers' physical work on the grueling trail
D. by supporting the idea that the men were pioneers both in their physical building of a trail and by alluding to the way they built cross-cultural
relationships