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Front Page
Frontier Sentinel
Humble beginnings
A new fort
'Buffalo Soldiers'
Securing the frontier
The last bugle
National Historic Site
venue travel
April 17, 1998
By James Abarr
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Click to enlarge
Of the Journal
On a fall day in October 1854, Lt. Col. Washington Seawell, with six companies of the 8th Infantry, marched into a range of conical peaks rising from the desert in the vast wilderness of far West Texas.
He had come with orders to build a military post to protect travelers and commerce on the southern branch of the San Antonio-El Paso Road, a major route linking the frontier of Texas settlement, 500 miles to the east, with new lands in the west.
Across the mouth of a canyon lined by jagged, palisaded cliffs near the banks of a mountain stream called Limpia Creek, the soldiers began construction of the post that became Fort Davis, named in honor of Jefferson Davis, then U.S. Secretary of War. Seven years later, he would be elected the first and only president of the Confederacy.
With a primary mission to curb marauding bands of Comanches, Kiowas and Mescalero Apaches, Fort Davis was strategically placed on the San Antonio-El Paso Road.
To the east of the post, the road was bisected by the great Comanche War Trail. For decades, this prairie highway had been used by warriors sweeping south from the Great Plains to raid West Texas and the haciendas and villages of northern Mexico. On the west, the road intersected trails cut by foraging Mescalero and Warm Springs Apaches from the mountains of southern New Mexico.
Over the next three decades, Fort Davis played a major role in the pacification and settlement of West Texas. Its infantry and cavalry forces were instumental in ending the Indian threat in the region, curbing outlaws and Mexican raiders, protecting mail routes and commerce and providing for the safety of scores of travelers.
In the process, Fort Davis grew into the largest military establishment in the West Texas defense system.
Today, the post is preserved as a National Historic Site and represents one of the nation's best remaining examples of a military post of the Western frontier era.
In its fledgling days, the fort built by Col. Seawell's soldiers was a humble affair — a primitive collection of pine-slab structures scattered irregularly up the picturesque canyon.
Troops were housed in six crude shelters, one for each company, extending across the mouth of the canyon in the shadow of Sleeping Lion Mountain. They were built of oak and cottonwood pickets thatched with grass.
By 1856, living conditions for enlisted men were improved when six stone barracks with flagstone floors were laid out in a line immediately to the west, but officers continued to live in a dozen rotting log huts. A post quartermaster of the day noted that they "are altogether very uncomfortable and insufficient quarters."
Military supplies were stored in rickety warehouses roofed with canvas or thatched with grass. Rounding out the early fort were the post headquarters, a stone bakehouse, blacksmith shop, stables, a 12-bed hospital, corrals and sutler's store.
While they struggled to make their fort liveable, the troops also faced the constant threat of Indian raiders. Throughout the remainder of the 1850s, Fort Davis was engaged in constant patrolling and skirmishing with Indian bands across a vast area from the Big Bend country on the Rio Grande north to the New Mexico border.
In March 1861, however, Texas seceded from the Union, a step that marked a new order of things at Fort Davis.
All federal installations in Texas were surrendered to the new Confederacy, and Fort Davis was occupied by Lt. Col. John Baylor's 2nd Texas Mounted Rifles. The Confederates, however, were only interested in the remote West Texas post as a supply base to support the pending Rebel invasion of New Mexico.
When that assault was turned back by federal forces in Glorieta Pass near Santa Fe in the spring of 1862, the troops at Davis abandoned the post and accompanied the retreating Confederate Army back to San Antonio.
For the next five years, Fort Davis lay deserted and decaying. It wasn't until 1867, two years after the close of the Civil War, that the Army reactivated the West Texas defense system and a new Fort Davis rose at the mouth of the canyon along the banks of Limpia Creek.
In June of that year, Lt. Col. Wesley Merritt, a brilliant Civil War cavalry commander, led four troops of the newly-formed 9th Cavalry into the wrecked post to begin a reconstruction program.
On the plain at the mouth of the canyon and east of the early post, a row of 13 sets of officers' quarters with separate kitchen buildings went up in a line on the west side of a 500-foot-long parade ground. On the east were six barracks with offices and other buildings fronting the parade ground at each end. Some structures were built of stone, but most were of adobe brick.
Large stables and corrals rounded out the new post, which eventually grew to more than 60 buildings.
With the arrival of the 9th Cavalry — and later its companion regiment, the 10th — the story of Fort Davis becomes a story of the famed "Buffalo Soldiers," who would garrison the West Texas post for the next 18 years.
In the mid-1870s, the 9th Cavalry was sent to New Mexico, where the regiment saw extensive service, while the 10th took over at Fort Davis.
These regiments of African-American soldiers with white officers compiled a distinguished record of service at forts throughout the West and earned the reputation as two of the best units in the frontier Army. Their combat record was unsurpassed, their pride and discipline were among the best in the Army, and the two regiments had a high proportion of Medal of Honor winners.
Cavalry forces at Fort Davis were augmented by the 24th and 25th Infantry, also composed of black soldiers with white officers.
In his book, "The Buffalo Soldiers: A Narrative of the Negro Cavalry of the West," historian William Leckie notes:
"Origin of the term is uncertain although the common explanation is that the Indian saw a similarity between the hair of the Negro soldier and that of the buffalo. Since the buffalo is a sacred animal to the Indian, it is unlikely that he would so name an enemy if respect were lacking."
In any event, the black troopers, many of them former slaves, accepted their nickname with pride, and a buffalo became a prominent feature of the 10th Cavalry's regimental crest.
Western artist Frederic Remington was fascinated by the black troopers. On a campaign with them in Arizona, he wrote:
"They may be tired and they may be hungry, but they do not see fit to augment their misery by finding fault with everybody and everything. In this particular, they are charming men with whom to serve.
"Officers have often confessed to me that when they are on long and monotonous field service and are troubled with a depression of spirit, they have only to go about the campfires of the Negro soldier in order to be amused and cheered.
"As to their bravery: 'Will they fight?' That question is easily answered. They have fought many, many times."
From 1867 to the mid-1880s, the 9th Cavalry, led by Col. Edward Hatch, and the 10th, commanded by Col. Benjamin Grierson, both officers with outstanding Civil War records, fought, bled and died across West Texas. The long and untiring service of these regiments eventually helped to make life and property secure on one of the most turbulent and strife-ridden frontiers in the saga of America's westward advance.
In 1875, when the 9th Cavalry was transferred to New Mexico to deal with growing Apache unrest in the territory, Col. Hatch became commander of the Military Department of New Mexico with headquarters in Santa Fe.
In 1880, it was Grierson's troopers of the 10th who, for all practical purposes, ended the Indian wars in Texas by defeating Victorio and his Apache warriors at the battles of Quitman Canyon and Rattlesnake Springs, west of Fort Davis. The two engagements forced the much-feared Apache leader to retreat into northern Mexico, where he was ambushed and killed by Mexican troops in the Tres Castillos Mountains of Chihuahua.
In between Indian campaigns, life at Fort Davis was a daily and monotonous routine of drill, training, guard mount and other military rituals.
Nonetheless, some Army wives saw the frontier as a land of romance and adventure. One officer's wife confided in her diary: "We lived, ate and slept by bugle calls."
She had a special affection for the cavalry stable call, "when the horses are groomed and watered; the thrilling assembly, or call-to-arms, when every soldier jumps for his rifle, every officer buckles on his saber, and a woman's heart stands still."
Soldiers, however, knew that misery far outweighed glitter. There were duties that invoked a variety of tedious work, performed while continually looking over their shoulders for hostile Indians.
Then there was the land itself, a hostile expanse of rocky desert broken by a few low mountain ranges. It was a region splashed with cactus and scrub brush and teeming with snakes, scorpions and centipedes.
As one soldier lamented: "Everything that grows pricks, and everything that breathes bites."
In its closing years, with Indian troubles ended, Fort Davis settled into a tranquil existence of military routine. Troops now protected railroad work crews, chased outlaws and patrolled the international border. Soon, however, even these tasks were taken over by agencies such as the Texas Rangers.
When Col. Grierson completed his last tour as post commander in 1885 and headed for retirement with a promotion to brigadier general, the long association of the Buffalo Soldiers with Fort Davis ended.
By June 1891, the post no longer justified its existence and it was ordered abandoned. The day the last troops pulled out, a man whose life had been closely associated with Fort Davis watched the exit, probably with a touch of nostalgia.
As Western military historian Robert Utley tells it:
"Across the road from the post, a recently arrived rancher was building his new home. He probably watched Company F, 5th Infantry Regiment, turn over the post to a caretaker and march down the road to Marfa to entrain for San Antonio.
"Brig. Gen. Benjamin H. Grierson, U.S. Army retired, had come back to Fort Davis to take up the life of a cattleman."
After the soldiers abandoned the post, civilians moved in and occupied the deserted barracks for a number of years and maintained them. In the 1930s, the post was purchased by D.A. Simmons, who performed extensive repairs and maintenance.
In 1961, the post came under the protection of the National Park Service, and in 1963, it was designated a National Historic Site. Through a continuing restoration program, half of the more than 50 original structures have been saved, including the quarters along Officer's Row.
Today, venerable Fort Davis lives on at the mouth of its palisaded canyon as one of the most complete surviving examples of a Western frontier military post.
