Fort Selden
New Mexico
Fort Selden was established in eighteen sixty-five to guard the Mesilla Valley, which was the main route between Texas and the Southwest. The first soldiers posted here were California volunteer cavalry, followed by companies of the One Hundred Twenty-Fifth Infantry, African American troops mustered near the end of the Civil War and among the earliest of the units later known as Buffalo Soldiers. They patrolled the desert, escorted mail coaches, and tracked raiders along the Jornada del Muerto.
The fort gained a different kind of historical footnote in eighteen eighty-four, when Captain Arthur MacArthur arrived as post commander with his family. His youngest son, four-year-old Douglas, learned to ride a horse and shoot a rifle here before he could read. That boy would later command Allied forces in the Pacific in World War Two.
Fort Selden was decommissioned in eighteen ninety-one as the Apache Wars wound down, and its adobe walls melted back into the desert.
