Fort Stockton: Comanche Springs and the Buffalo Soldiers

Everything about Fort Stockton, Texas, begins with water. Out here in the Trans-Pecos, where the Chihuahuan Desert stretches in every direction, a cluster of springs called Comanche Springs once gushed more water than almost any other source in Texas. That water made this spot a crossroads for thousands of years.

The Comanche knew it. Their war trail into Mexico ran directly through here. So did the upper and lower San Antonio-to-El Paso roads, the Butterfield Overland Mail route, and the San Antonio-to-Chihuahua Trail. Whoever controlled Comanche Springs controlled the corridor.

The United States Army established Camp Stockton in eighteen fifty-nine and made it a full fort within the next year, positioning it to protect the mail service, emigrant wagons, and cattle drives from Apache and Comanche raids. The fort closed during the Civil War, briefly fell to Confederate troops, and was abandoned entirely for several years.

When the Army returned in eighteen sixty-seven, it sent the Ninth Cavalry Regiment to hold the post. The Ninth was one of the original Buffalo Soldier regiments, all-Black enlisted units authorized by Congress after the Civil War, commanded at Fort Stockton by Colonel Edward Hatch. Over the next two decades, most of the soldiers garrisoned here were Buffalo Soldiers. They patrolled hundreds of miles of desert, scouted water sources, and fought in engagements across the region, often under miserable conditions, for thirteen dollars a month.

Comanche Springs, which had sustained life here for millennia, stopped flowing by the late nineteen fifties after groundwater pumping for agriculture depleted the aquifer. Today a roadside marker stands near the dry spring bed. The adobe ruins of the original fort have been partially reconstructed, and the Annie Riggs Museum preserves the story of soldiers and settlers who held this desert outpost until the Army finally left for good on June twenty-seventh, eighteen eighty-six.