Fort Concho, Texas, and the Buffalo Soldiers

F Troop, Ninth Cavalry, in the 1880s. Public domain.

Building the fort

• 1867: Fort Concho is founded on the Concho River in Texas, replacing Fort Chadbourne, which had no water source for long-term use.
• December 10, 1867: Captain David W. Porter of the Quartermaster Department begins construction. It's slow: materials come by oxcart from the Gulf Coast.
• August 1869: the first permanent buildings are done — five officers' houses and one barracks.
• By 1872: four barracks, eight officers' houses, a hospital, a magazine, a bakery, storehouses, workshops and stables.

The Fourth Cavalry, the first troops posted there, helped build it. They also patrolled, scouted, and escorted cattle herds and wagon trains on the San Antonio–El Paso Road. As the Army pressed the Comanche, Fort Concho became an important base by 1875.

The Tenth Cavalry

On April 10, 1875, Buffalo Soldiers of the Tenth Cavalry replaced the Fourth, under Colonel Benjamin Grierson, who made the fort his headquarters. The troopers:

• built roads and telegraph lines;
• escorted stagecoaches, cattle drives and railroad survey parties;
• served as a general police force;
• fought in campaigns against Indigenous peoples, including the Victorio Campaign against Mescalero Apache.

Lieutenant Henry O. Flipper, the first African American graduate of West Point, served here in 1880 before moving to Fort Davis.

The Tenth kept its regimental headquarters at Fort Concho until July 1882, when it moved it and many of its men west to Fort Davis, Texas. Every Buffalo Soldier regiment — the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry and the Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth Infantry — served at Fort Concho at some point.

Decline and survival

• From 1882, the fort mattered less, partly because of the new town of San Angelo across the river.
• 1882–1889: mostly a holding post for soldiers awaiting reassignment.
• June 20, 1889: the Army abandoned it.

Most buildings escaped demolition by becoming homes and storage. Today the fort is preserved as Historic Fort Concho, a National Historic Landmark.

Sources

Based on "Buffalo Soldiers at Fort Concho," Charles Young Buffalo Soldiers National Monument, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain.