Name: Fort Davis, Texas
Address: Fort Davis, TX

Flipper, Henry Ossian

1877

Henry Ossian Flipper, engineer, the first Black graduate of West Point, the eldest of five sons of Festus and Isabella Flipper, was born a slave at Thomasville, Georgia, on March 21, 1856. He attended school at the American Missionary Association, and in 1873, as a freshman at Atlanta University, he was appointed to the United States Military Academy. Although Flipper was the fifth Black accepted to West Point, he was the first to graduate. At West Point he was often ostracized and had little social interaction with White cadets beyond official activities. He graduated fiftieth in a class of seventy-six on June 14, 1877, and accepted a commission as a second lieutenant. Flipper described his successful struggle against ostracism and prejudice in The Colored Cadet at West Point (1878). In January 1878 he was assigned to Company A of the Tenth United States Cavalry . As an officer in the Tenth Cavalry, Flipper served at forts Elliott, Concho, Quitman, and Davis, Texas, and at Fort Sill, Indian Territory. He first reached Texas on his way to Fort Sill, where he supervised the drainage of malarial ponds. Flipper's Ditch is now a national historic landmark. He later constructed a road from Gainesville to Fort Sill after a troop of the Fourth United States Cavalry got drunk and deserted the lieutenant assigned to do the job. Flipper also installed a telegraph line from Fort Elliott to Fort Supply, Indian Territory, scouted on the Llano Estacado , and assisted in the return of Quanah Parker 's band from Palo Duro Canyon to the Fort Sill reservation in the winter of 1878-79. During the Victorio campaign of 1880 he fought in two battles at Eagle Springs, Texas. For his service in the field Flipper was made acting assistant quartermaster, post quartermaster, and acting commissary of subsistence at Fort Davis, Jeff Davis County. The positions placed him in charge of the fort's supplies and physical plant. When Col. William Rufus Shafter became commanding officer of Fort Davis in 1881, he immediately relieved Flipper as quartermaster and planned to relieve him as commissary as soon as he found a replacement. Flipper suspected what he later called a systematic plan of persecution, and is said to have been warned by civilians at the post of a plot by White officers to force him from the army. The following year, when he discovered post funds missing from his quarters, he attempted to conceal the loss until he could find or replace the money. When Shafter learned of the discrepancy, he immediately filed charges against him. A divided court-martial acquitted Flipper of charges of embezzlement but pronounced him guilty of "conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman." He was dismissed from the service on June 30, 1882. (Accounts of the court-martial proceedings may be found in the San Antonio Express , November 2-December 14, 1881.) President Chester A. Arthur made a final confirmation of the verdict on June 24, 1882. Flipper maintained his innocence until his death and waged a lifelong battle for reinstatement in the army. He went to El Paso after his dismissal and remained there until 1883, when he went to work as an assistant engineer for a surveying company composed of former Confederate officers. He assisted the company in surveying public lands in Mexico and helped run a boundary line between the states of Coahuila and Chihuahua in 1883. Between 1883 and 1891 he worked in Chihuahua and Sonora as a surveyor for several other American land companies. In 1887 he opened a civil and mining engineering office in Nogales, Arizona. In 1891 the community of Nogales employed Flipper to prepare the Nogales de Elias land grant case (1893), a dispute over title to the San Juan de las Boquillas y Nogales Mexican land grant in Cochise County, Arizona. Flipper served as the government's only witness, and his testimony resulted in the grant's being declared invalid. The ruling saved the property of hundreds of landowners. Flipper's activity in the comm

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Fort Davis

1854

Established by Lieut. Col. Washington Seawell with six companies of the Eighth U.S. Infantry in October 1854 for protecting travelers on the San Antonio-El Paso Road. Named in honor of the then Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis, it was abandoned by federal troops in April 1861, reoccupied in 1867. Troops from the post helped to bring about the peaceful settlement and development of the region. Fort Davis was deactivated in 1891.

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Bush, Ira Jefferson

1891

Ira Jefferson Bush, frontier physician, was born in 1865 on his grandfather's plantation in Lawrence, Mississippi, the oldest son of Rev. Thomas Deloach and Emily (Price) Bush's ten children. He attended public schools and the University of Mississippi, and graduated in 1890 from Louisville Medical College. His first patients were from the cotton plantations of Alto, Louisiana, on the banks of the Boeuf River. After he had swamp fever, on the advice of his doctor to find a better environment for his health, he established a practice at Fort Davis, Jeff Davis County, Texas, in 1891. The army abandoned the post a few months after his arrival, and in 1893 Bush took over the practice of a medical school classmate in Pecos. There he served as surgeon for two railroad companies and was the county health officer. In the summer of 1899 he moved to El Paso. Hobbies of big game hunting and archeological exploration led him to visit Mexico frequently. He served several years as the company doctor for mining and lumber interests in Temósachic, Chihuahua, and elsewhere in Mexico, before returning to El Paso. As a close friend of Francisco (Pancho) Villa , Bush served as chief surgeon general of the insurrectionist army during the Mexican Revolution . He was a member of the El Paso County Medical Society, the State Medical Association of Texas, and the American Medical Association. He married Bertha Henderson in 1907. They had no children. Bush died on March 10, 1939, in an El Paso hospital.

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Fort Davis, TX

1854

Fort Davis, the county seat of Jeff Davis County, is on Limpia Creek at the intersection of State highways 17 and 118, eighty miles northeast of Presidio and 175 miles southeast of El Paso in south central Jeff Davis County. The precursor of the town was a rough-and-tumble settlement known as Chihuahua, which formed just southwest of the military post of Fort Davis after it was established in 1854. The fort was on the site of an earlier Indian village, which the earliest Anglo-American explorers of the area called Painted Comanche Camp. When Henry Skillman contracted to carry the mail from San Antonio to El Paso in 1850, a stage stand was established near the site of the future town. E. P. Webster, a native of Illinois, and Diedrick Dutchover, a Belgian immigrant who had fought in the Mexican War , rode with W. A. (Big Foot) Wallace to escort the first mail coach to the site, by way of Fort Concho. Webster remained in Limpia Canyon as the first master of the stage station there and may have been the first White settler in the area. Dutchover rode as a guard for two more years before settling at Fort Davis. During the Civil War , when Confederate troops withdrew from the fort, they left Dutchover, who had maintained strict neutrality while establishing a small sheep ranch near the post, in charge. Almost immediately the Apache chief Nicolás attacked the settlement. Dutchover, a Mexican woman with two children, and four Americans hid on the roof for three days while the Apaches looted the fort. On the third night Dutchover and all the others, except one of the Americans, who had fallen ill, slipped out and began the long trek to Presidio, eighty miles away. One day later the stage arrived to find a ravaged fort and the American dead on the roof, apparently of natural causes. Dutchover and the others staggered into Presidio four days later. The Belgian later returned to Fort Davis and was employed as a hauling contractor. After 1867, when troops of the Ninth United States Cavalry reoccupied the fort, the town of Fort Davis became "the most important town in the Trans-Pecos country," by virtue of its position at the crossroads of two important trails and its status as a base for travelers and hunters. A. J. Buckoz was given permission to serve as post trader in 1867, although he was unceremoniously replaced four years later. Other settlers who came with the return of the troops included storekeeper Dan Murphy, butcher Sam R. Miller, and baker Whitaker Keesey, who later became the most influential merchant in Fort Davis. Sgt. Charles Mulhern, a native of County Donegal, Ireland, arrived in the late 1870s and eventually acquired a substantial amount of land in the area; he and Gen. Benjamin Grierson , who retired to Fort Davis in 1890, were the only military men who became important local landowners. In the 1880s Fort Davis became a ranching center, as ambitious cattlemen poured into the Trans-Pecos, many of them seeking to escape the Texas fever epidemic raging in other parts of the state. Although one local historian insisted that "Fort Davis never was a wild town," the place had its share of colorful legends. One involved Dolores Gavino Doporto, who as a young woman became engaged to a goatherd named José. While José was out tending his goats she would communicate with him by building a fire every Thursday night on the low mountain just south of town. Shortly before their wedding day José was killed and scalped by Mescaleros while tending his goats in or near Musquiz Canyon. Dolores, overcome with grief, continued to climb the mountain and build her fire every Thursday night for some thirty or forty years. When she died in 1893 she was buried near the path she had worn on her lonely trips up the mountain, which became known as Dolores Mountain. When Presidio County was organized in April 1871 it included the areas of present Jeff Davis and Brewster counties. Fort Davis was selected as the county seat, but the courthouse later bur

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Fort Davis National Historic Site

1854

Key frontier military post in West Texas, notable as a station for the Buffalo Soldiers, African American troops who served on the Western frontier after the Civil War.

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Smith-Carlton Adobe House

1873

In 1873, Archie Smith, a former Buffalo Soldier in the 24th U.S. Infantry at Fort Davis, built a home on 160 acres near the base of Dolores Mountain using local materials. Native oak beams support the near-rectangular one-story adobe. A large room with a vaulted ceiling was a private chapel for Smith’s wife. It was also open to other denominations and Catholic masses before St. Joseph was built. In 1911, Emmett H. Carlton bought the property and built a new home, using the Smith house as a barn and stabilizing its walls with a lime plaster. Don and Vida Carlton occupied the house after restoring it in the early 1970s. The house is notable as the oldest home still in use as a residence in Fort Davis. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 2013

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Fort Davis, Texas

Music in Fort Davis

Songs About Fort Davis

Artists From Fort Davis

Rivers & Roads in Song near Fort Davis

History of Fort Davis

Flipper, Henry Ossian

Fort Davis

Bush, Ira Jefferson

Fort Davis, TX

Fort Davis National Historic Site

Smith-Carlton Adobe House

Things to Do in Fort Davis

Everything Near Fort Davis