Fort Davis

Fort Davis is the fort named for the enemy — established in 1854 honoring Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, abandoned to the Confederacy he led in 1861, and rebuilt in 1867 by the Ninth Cavalry's Buffalo Soldiers under Wesley Merritt. The post that carried Davis's name became one of the most important African-American garrisons on the frontier — the irony the file keeps.

The fort guarded the San Antonio-El Paso Road through Apache and Comanche country — the mail coaches and emigrant trains on the route to California gold. The Ninth and Tenth Cavalry, the Twenty-Fourth and Twenty-Fifth Infantry — all four Black regiments served here; Henry Flipper, the first Black West Point graduate, was court-martialed at Fort Davis in 1881 on charges historians now read as racially motivated, vindicated by the Army in 1976 and pardoned posthumously in 1999.

The fort survived because it never burned — when the Army left in 1891 the adobe and stone stood until the National Park Service took it in 1961, and it's now the best-preserved Indian Wars post in the Southwest: the officers' row, the barracks, the hospital, and the canyon walls the Apaches watched it from. The file keeps the fort's three lives — Davis's name, the Confederacy's depot, and the Buffalo Soldiers' post — under the same parade ground.

Fort Davis is the archive's frontier file — the post named for the Confederate president rebuilt by Black cavalry, where Flipper was tried, and the best-preserved Indian Wars fort in the Southwest.