The Soldier Who Carved Roads Through Mountains and Barriers

Born enslaved in Mays Lick, Kentucky, in 1864, Charles Young began life amid the nation’s greatest fracture. His parents, Gabriel and Arminta Young, escaped slavery when he was an infant, carrying their son across the Ohio River to freedom. In Ripley, Ohio—a town alive with the daring of the Underground Railroad—Young grew up steeped in both the promise of liberty and the persistence of prejudice. His life would become a hallmark of resilience, carrying him from the classrooms of a small border town to the high Sierras and the highest ranks of the United States Army.

From Ripley to West Point

Charles Young in 1916

Young’s mind caught the attention of teachers early. He became the first Black student to graduate from Ripley’s white high school with honors and quickly proved that his ambitions matched his intellect. In 1884, he earned a coveted appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point. There, he endured years of unrelenting isolation—classmates who refused to speak to him, instructors who questioned his every move. Yet, like the trees he would one day help protect, he bent without breaking. He would graduate as only the third African American in history to achieve this distinction.

Guarding the Nation’s Wild Places

By the summer of 1903, Captain Young commanded troops of the famed all-Black 9th Cavalry, the Buffalo Soldiers. When the War Department sent him and his men to manage the young Sequoia and General Grant national parks in California, the assignment was as much an experiment as a test. These parks, barely a decade old, were plagued by poaching, illegal grazing, and fragile access roads.

Young saw possibilities where others saw obstacles. He ordered his men to begin work early in the season and personally oversaw the crews that cut a road through rock and forest to the Giant Forest, home of the largest trees in the United States. By mid-August, wagons rattled into the grove for the first time. Still unsatisfied, he pushed the work farther, extending the road to the base of Moro Rock with a grade so gentle that he promised it “should in future ensure a thousand tourists where in previous years there have been but a hundred.”

He also directed the improvement of more than eighteen miles of trails, secured agreements from private landowners to sell key tracts within the park, and ensured that no poaching violations marred his watch.

“Indeed, a journey through this park and the Sierra Forest Reserve to the Mount Whitney country will convince even the least thoughtful man of the needfulness of preserving these mountains just as they are, with their clothing of trees, shrubs, rocks, and vines, and of their importance to the valleys below as reservoirs for storage of water for agricultural and domestic purposes. In this, lies the necessity of forest preservation.”

–Captain Charles Young in Report of the Acting Superintendent of Sequoia and General Grant National Parks, California, October 15, 1903

Beyond the Sierra

The summer in Sequoia was only one chapter in a life defined by service and audacity. Young went on to become a military attaché in Haiti and Liberia, reorganizing Liberia’s defense forces and mapping remote regions while building roads through dense jungle. When, on the eve of World War I, Army officials forced his medical retirement for high blood pressure, Young refused to yield. He mounted his horse in Wilberforce, Ohio, and rode 500 miles to Washington, D.C., to prove his fitness for command.

The Army relented; he was reinstated and promoted to colonel, commanding the all-Black training camp at Camp Grant, Illinois. Young’s career broke barriers again and again: the first Black U.S. national park superintendent, the first Black military attaché to Liberia, the highest-ranking African American officer in the Army of his era. He founded the military science program at Wilberforce University, mentoring a generation of Black officers and scholars. His achievements were matched by the quiet dignity with which he carried them.

A Character as Enduring as the Trees

Young died in 1922 while serving again in Liberia, felled by kidney disease at fifty-eight. He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery with full honors, only the fourth soldier to receive such distinction. Nearly a century later, in 2021, the U.S. Army posthumously promoted him to Brigadier General—a recognition of a rank he had long earned in spirit.

Today, the roads Young carved through Sequoia still carry millions of visitors into the Giant Forest. In the hush beneath the giant sequoias, his presence lingers. It is the art of shaping a world more just, more open, and more enduring than the one you were given. Like the trees he protected, Charles Young stands tall in history: a soldier, a builder, and a guardian of both land and legacy.