Fort Davis and the Apache Wars: Victorio's Campaign

Fort Davis was built in eighteen fifty-four on a bench of volcanic rock in the Davis Mountains to protect the wagon road between San Antonio and El Paso. It operated, with gaps during the Civil War, through eighteen ninety-one. In the span of those thirty-seven years, the political situation in the Trans-Pecos shifted from Mexican borderland frontier to Union-Confederate contest to Apache campaign theater.

The most intense military phase from this post came in the years eighteen seventy-nine and eighteen eighty, during the campaign led by Victorio, a Warm Springs Apache leader who had refused relocation to a reservation in New Mexico and taken his band into the Sierra Madre of Chihuahua. From there, Victorio conducted a guerrilla campaign across the Trans-Pecos desert, crossing and recrossing the Rio Grande, raiding ranches and supply trains, and repeatedly evading the Ninth Cavalry patrols sent from Fort Davis to stop him.

Victorio's campaign was, by the tactical standards of the Army officers who pursued him, among the most sophisticated mobile operations of the Indian Wars period. He knew the terrain intimately. He could cover distances that the cavalry could not match. The Ninth Cavalry, the Buffalo Soldiers posted here, chased him for two years across some of the most difficult ground in North America.

Victorio was killed by Mexican forces in the Tres Castillos mountains of Chihuahua in October of eighteen eighty. The campaign ended with his death, not with his capture.

The fort's restored buildings and parade ground give a sense of the installation's scale. What they cannot easily convey is the distance that soldiers patrolled from this base, or what it meant to pursue a man across a desert that was his homeland and their assignment.