Fort Richardson

Fort Richardson was the biggest post in Texas — the 1867 fort on Lost Creek that held the northernmost anchor of the frontier line, with 800 soldiers at its peak and the largest garrison in the country in 1872. The 4th Cavalry rode out of it; Mackenzie launched the Palo Duro campaign from its corrals; thirty Medals of Honor came back to its rolls.

The hospital is the building that matters — the sandstone block completed in 1870, the most modern medical building between Fort Worth and El Paso, with eighteen-inch walls and a morgue upstairs until they built a separate dead house in 1875. More men died of disease than of wounds — the surgeon fought bad water, alcoholism, and the venereal cases that filled the wards while the scouts were out.

When Palo Duro ended the war the fort was redundant — the Army pulled out in 1878, the fifty-five buildings got scavenged into Jacksboro's construction, and the hospital and morgue and bakery are what's left for the state to keep. The file keeps the fort's peak and its fall: the largest garrison in the country, the most modern hospital on the frontier, and the ruins the town's builders took apart.

Fort Richardson is the archive's largest-garrison file — the 1867 post that was the biggest in America, the 4th Cavalry's launching point for Palo Duro, and the sandstone hospital that's the best building left on the Texas frontier.