Fort Concho and the Buffalo Soldiers of West Texas

At the junction of the North and Main Concho Rivers, the Army built something unusual in West Texas: a post constructed not of timber, which was scarce, but of native limestone. Fort Concho rose through the late eighteen sixties as one of the most substantial permanent military installations on the southern Plains. What made it distinctive was not the stone, however. It was the soldiers.

Established in November eighteen sixty-seven to replace the inadequate Fort Chadbourne, Fort Concho served as regimental headquarters for the Tenth United States Cavalry from eighteen seventy-five until eighteen eighty-two. The Tenth was one of four all-Black regiments created by Congress after the Civil War to serve on the western frontier. Sometime in the late eighteen sixties, Cheyenne warriors they faced began calling them Buffalo Soldiers, reportedly because they fought with the ferocity and endurance associated with the buffalo, an animal the Plains nations held sacred. The name spread. The soldiers wore it with pride.

From Fort Concho, the Buffalo Soldiers ranged across an enormous theater of operations. They fought in Ranald Mackenzie's campaign against the Comanche in eighteen seventy-two. They participated in the Red River War of eighteen seventy-four, which broke the last organized resistance of the Comanche and Kiowa to reservation life. They chased Victorio's Apache band through the deserts of West Texas and New Mexico in eighteen seventy-nine and eighteen eighty, campaigning through country so brutal that the scouting itself was the hardship. In between the campaigns, they built roads, strung telegraph lines, escorted mail coaches, mapped vast stretches of terrain that appeared on no accurate chart, and protected the survey parties laying out the routes of future railroads.

Fort Concho was abandoned in eighteen eighty-nine when the railroad arrived and made the old supply routes irrelevant. The limestone buildings survived. Today the fort is one of the best-preserved frontier military posts in the country, its surviving original and reconstructed structures, more than twenty in all, still standing along the Concho River, a monument to the soldiers who held and mapped the edge of a nation still deciding what it was.