The decade following 1849 was most active. The army detachments under capable officers explored to find routes from East Texas and from San Antonio to El Paso. But the wagon trains did not wait for their findings; they often made their own way and did their well-known creditable job. Mr. Jefferson Davis, Secretary of War, and himself a distinguished veteran of the Mexican War, did about all in his power to aid the new state of Texas, the Mexican settlements and the immigrant trains. He made treaties with the Indians and arranged reservations for them. This latter deal was not too successful. Friendly East Texas Indians almost starved on the reservations, and the more warlike plains tribes had no idea of staying there even when they agreed to move in. The old men’s tales of conquest and horse stealing were more than the young bucks could take.
Mr. Davis built new forts and, recognizing the great problems of communications that existed between such far flung positions, sought to remedy those by importing in 1856, through the seaport of Indianola, camels and their Arabian drivers.
G. Catlin
Comanche Village
From “The North American Indians,” Vol. II. by George Catlin, London 1841. Picture by Catlin, 1834, escorted by General Henry Leavenworth and regiment of U.S. Dragoons.
The camels were concentrated at Camp Verde in Southern Kerr County, and breeding and testing immediately proceeded at a good pace. Tests for their strength and endurance carried the caravans across the Continental Divide and back, and the results were very gratifying. The Civil War put an end to the experiments. The last camel herd, before final sellouts to the carnivals, was privately owned near Austin in the early 1880’s.
By the time the Civil War broke out in 1861, the War Department had finally followed the advice of such able soldiers as Joe Johnston and Chase Whiting. The forts received a new alignment and were manned mostly by cavalry. Supplies were sent in as before, from bases like San Antonio. The wagons, pulled by oxen or mules, were well guarded in most instances by soldiers. The contracts for furnishing the supplies and their transportation were let to civilians.
The new alignment caused the abandonment of some interior forts and camps. The line on the lower Rio Grande was extended up the river by building Fort Hudson near the Devil’s River, about thirty miles north of San Felipe. Out in far Western Texas, they built Fort Quitman, down the river from El Paso.
Several things were done to discourage the Comanche and Kiowa whose depredations along the Grand War Trail had been greatly stepped up. The War Department flanked the trail on the west by the building of a sizeable establishment in a beautiful and romantic spot in the Davis Mountains and named it Fort Davis in honor of the secretary. Near this spot, more than three hundred years before, had passed the shipwrecked, unhorsed and enslaved, but still valiant Spaniard, Cabeza de Vaca. He would later write, in his report to his Viceroy describing his journey after leaving the great arid plains to the north, of a valley through which flowed “limpid waters.”[2]
After Fort Davis, the Department unveiled Fort Lancaster (western Crockett County) as a flanker to the east of the trail. It was cozily situated in the mesas not far from the Pecos River and beside Live Oak Creek that flows delightful spring water.
Then the War Department built Fort Stockton (Pecos County), smack in the middle of the Grand Trail and right beside the best spring of water on its entire route.