Fort Clark: Frontier Anchor on the Rio Grande Road

Near the town of Brackettville in Kinney County, the springs at Las Moras Creek fed one of the longest-serving military posts in the American West. Fort Clark was established on June twentieth, eighteen fifty-two, as the southernmost anchor of a chain of frontier forts running from the Rio Grande to the Red River, and it remained an active Army installation for nearly a century.

The fort was named for Major John B. Clark, killed in the Mexican War at the Battle of Buena Vista. Its mission was clear: guard the military road from San Antonio to El Paso, protect settlers from raids originating on both sides of the border, and serve as a base for operations into the complex country along the Rio Grande. Supply merchants followed the troops, and Oscar Brackett established a village nearby that became the town of Brackettville.

Fort Clark is inseparable from the history of the Black Seminole Scouts, perhaps the most remarkable auxiliary force in the history of the frontier Army. Descendants of escaped enslaved people who had intermarried with Seminole communities in Florida and later in Mexico, the Scouts arrived at Fort Clark in the early eighteen seventies after twenty years protecting Mexican border settlements from hostile raids. Lieutenant John L. Bullis commanded them from eighteen seventy-three to eighteen eighty-one, leading them on dozens of operations into Texas and across the border. Four Scouts won the Medal of Honor, and none of Bullis's commands was ever defeated.

Colonel Ranald Mackenzie, who led some of the most decisive campaigns against Comanche and Kickapoo raiders, operated from Fort Clark, and the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry, the Buffalo Soldier regiments, rotated through at various times. In nineteen thirty-eight, the Fifth Cavalry's regimental commander was Colonel George S. Patton, who would go on to lead armored divisions across North Africa and Europe.

The fort was decommissioned in nineteen forty-six and is today a private community and resort, its limestone buildings and parade ground still intact.