Fort Richardson and the Warren Wagon Train Raid

On the morning of May eighteenth, eighteen seventy-one, General William Tecumseh Sherman rode past Salt Creek Prairie on his way to Fort Richardson, just a few miles north of present-day Jacksboro. Hidden in the tree line above him, a war party of more than one hundred fifty Kiowa warriors waited. Their leader, Chief Satanta, later said a medicine man had warned him to let the first group of riders pass. The larger prize was coming behind them. Sherman and his escort rode through untouched.

The larger prize was Henry Warren's freight convoy: ten teamsters hauling corn and supplies to the frontier forts. The Kiowa struck the wagons at Salt Creek Crossing, killing seven men and mutilating their bodies. It was the last major raid of the Red River War era, and it happened while the commanding general of the United States Army was close enough to hear the gunfire.

Fort Richardson had been established in eighteen sixty-seven at Lost Creek, the northernmost of the string of Texas frontier forts built to protect settlers pushing west after the Civil War. Units of the Sixth and Fourth Cavalry, including Buffalo Soldiers of the Tenth Cavalry, rotated through its limestone barracks. The fort was named for General Israel Richardson, who had died of wounds suffered at the Battle of Antietam.

Sherman, furious, ordered the arrest of Satanta and Big Tree. The two Kiowa chiefs were brought to Jacksboro for trial, the first time in American history that Indian leaders had been brought to a civilian court in the community where they had committed their alleged crimes. Both were convicted of murder and sentenced to hang, though Governor Edmund Davis commuted their sentences to life imprisonment. The legal precedent set in that sweltering second-floor courthouse rippled across federal Indian policy for a generation.

Fort Richardson was abandoned in eighteen seventy-eight, its mission complete as the frontier moved west. The stone barracks still stand today as a Texas state park.