Frontier Crossroads: Fort Davis and the West (review)

In Frontier Crossroads, Robert Wooster has written a model microhistory of a frontier outpost and its environs in the west Texas desert. While never overstating the strategic importance of this particular military installation, Wooster, the Joe B. Frantz Professor of History at Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi, does present a convincing case for the centrality of the army to the settling of the Western frontier, and maintains that Fort Davis, located as it was on the strategic route from San Antonio through El Paso and on to the gold fields of California, represented a significant "intersection of nationalistic expectations, social dynamics, and western realities" (p. 30).

Wooster commences his study with a sketch of the prehistoric beginnings of the region, outlining the cultural and ethnic histories of the first dwellers in the area, the Jumanos and their "more militaristic" (p. 3) successors, the Mescalero Apache. He briefly traces the impact of the arrival of the agents of the Spanish empire in search of God, gold, and glory, but notes that very soon the conquistadores' reach exceeded their grasp, and by 1767 the Spanish had abandoned the region. Imperial Spain's most lasting legacy to west Texas lay not in settlement but in the impact of the European diseases that all but destroyed its indigenous cultures and the horse that allowed their "even more militaristic" successors, the Comanches, to extend their reach across Texas and into northern Mexico. The Republic of Mexico, Spain's heir to what Herbert Eugene Bolton called "the north rim of Christendom," proved as little able to check the spread of the Comanche empire as its mother country had been, and so, following the achievement of independence of the Republic of Texas in 1836, Anglo-Americans took up the task of breaching the Comanche barrier to South Plains settlement.

With Texas's annexation in 1846 and the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, the United States army assumed responsibility for containing Plains Indian raiders in the trans-Pecos region and, with the discovery of gold in California, that task took on much greater significance. As part of a chain of guardian outposts along the road to the Pacific, the army established Fort Davis in 1854 and, as Wooster says, "along with Fort Davis came the United States" (p. 87).

If the containment of Comanche raiders was the purpose for the founding of Fort Davis, however, the sporadic and most often futile campaigns that its garrison waged against their more mobile foes proved much less important to the settlement of the region than did the economic impact of federal investment in that struggle. After the United States Army evacuated the post in 1861 it was briefly garrisoned by Confederate forces, only to be again abandoned under pressure of a resurgent Indian threat. In 1867, troops of the Ninth United States Cavalry—the first of four all-black regiments to garrison the post—reoccupied it, and soon the nearby town of Fort Davis became the most important civilian community in the area. The influence of Fort Davis, as Wooster observes, extended far beyond the battlefield, making it "the developmental engine for non-Indian settlement of the central Trans-Pecos," and for fifty years, until its ultimate abandonment in 1891, a vital attraction to newcomers "seeking jobs, fresh starts, and fortunes" in the Davis Mountains region (pp. xi, 123).

Although Wooster does an altogether admirable job of detailing the numerous patrols that the army launched against its swift striking foes and the dozens of nameless skirmishes that they fought, the principal value of this book lies in its contribution to the social history of the West, recreating through exhaustive research and in elegant style, the life of a frontier community and the day to day routine of the officers and men of the fort and of the civilians—brown, black, and white—who found protection...