Note. Called after a distinguished officer in the American army. Such is the fashion in naming the frontier posts.
Chapter Twenty Six.
A Frontier Fort.
The word “fort” calls up before the mind a massive structure, with angles and embrasures, bastions and battlements, curtains, casemates, and glacis—a place of great strength, for this is its essential signification. Such structures have the Spaniards raised in Florida as elsewhere—some of which (Note 1) are still standing, while others, even in their ruins, bear witness to the grandeur and glory that enveloped them at that time, when the leopard flag waved proudly above their walls.
There is a remarkable dissimilarity between the colonial architecture of Spain and that of other European nations. In America the Spaniards built without regard to pains or expense, as if they believed that their tenure would be eternal. Even in Florida, they could have no idea their lease would be so short—no forecast of so early an ejectment.
After all, these great fortresses served them a purpose. But for their protection, the dark Yamassee, and, after him, the conquering Seminole, would have driven them from the flowery peninsula long before the period of their actual rendition.
The United States has its great stone fortresses; but far different from these are the “forts” of frontier phraseology, which figure in the story of border wars, and which, at this hour, gird the territory of the United States as with a gigantic chain. In these are no grand battlements of cut rock, no costly casemates, no idle ornaments of engineering. They are rude erections of hewn logs, of temporary intent, put up at little expense, to be abandoned with as little loss—ready to follow the ever-flitting frontier in its rapid recession.