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Southwestern Historical Quarterly 110.2 (2006) 172-191


Fort Davis and the Close of a Military Frontier
Robert Wooster

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Figure 1
Fort Davis in the 1880s, as seen from the north ridge. Enlisted men's barracks and stables are to the left, the parade ground is in the center, and officers' row is on the right. Courtesy Fort Davis National Historic Site.
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The military community at Fort Davis, Texas, was bustling in the early summer of 1891. Four companies of the Twenty-third Infantry Regiment were getting ready for a transfer to forts McIntosh and Bliss. A troop of the Third Cavalry was preparing to move out to Fort Hancock, and Company F, Fifth Infantry, was readying to march to Fort Sam Houston. An auction of condemned property, held June 19, netted the federal government $2,951.20. Lt. Charles B. Hardin, post quartermaster, had been authorized to employ Pvt. William Boyer, Fifth Infantry, on an extra duty assignment: the United States Army was evacuating Fort Davis, and Hardin needed an assistant to help him take care of several minor details. As a former soldier who had retired in the local area put it, "[there are] plenty of houses in Davis now and no one to live in them." 1

The decision to close Fort Davis offers an excellent opportunity to examine relationships between Texans, Westerners, and their federal government. Whatever the outcome of ongoing debates about whether Texas should be considered Southern or Western, most observers would probably agree that Fort Davis, located in the heart of the Trans-Pecos region nearly four hundred miles west of San Antonio, is both Texas and Western. 2 [End Page 173] Although older writers such as Frederick Jackson Turner and Walter Prescott Webb focused largely on the ingenuity and individualism of the early non-Indians who lived in such regions, later scholars have emphasized the close association between Westerners and their federal government. Indeed, Joe B. Frantz, Webb's successor as the Lone Star State's most celebrated historian, labeled the West as a "child of federal subsidy." "How fast the West and Texas would have built without this continuous influx of federal money cannot be determined," wrote Frantz, "but simple logic recognizes how much more swiftly the process went because Washington was forever pumping in the dollars of all the taxpayers to build up the new area."Patricia N. Limerick, whose work epitomized the "New Western History" of the 1980s and 1990s, described the relationship between Westerners and Washington as being that of "denial and dependence." As Limerick points out, "the two key frontier activities—the control of Indians and the distribution of land—were primarily federal responsibilities, at times involving considerable expense." 3

In his political history of late-nineteenth-century Wyoming, historian Lewis L. Gould suggests a more nuanced middle ground that also seems applicable to a broader West: "The aridity, distance, and barrenness of Wyoming compromised the usual frontier virtues of individualism and self-reliance, and men looked to Washington for support," concludes Gould. "Yet with no sense of inconsistency they maintained their allegiance to the frontier spirit even as . . . they set about framing institutional arrangements for the smoother flow of federal largesse. This behavior did not appear paradoxical to Wyoming residents. They had the courage and the desire to succeed in the inhospitable terrain of their state, and they asked only for their fair share of subsidies until they could stand alone." 4

Associations between Texans, Westerners, and their federal government were especially important when it came to the United States Army. Called "a child of the frontier" by Francis Paul Prucha, the army played a vital role in the non-Indian occupation and development of the American West. Thoughtful Westerners understood this, and pressed hard to establish and [End Page 174] protect their local military bases. In 1894, for example, fearing base closures in his district (which included Fort Clark as well as subposts at Eagle Pass and Del Rio...

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