Don't Confuse the Wrapping with the Gift

I was fully prepared to dislike Fort Stockton.  After all, the only reason I was staying in this West Texas community of 8,400 was its location between San Antonio and Las Cruces, and I viewed it as a place that was just in the way of my destination.

But I was wrong.

Yesterday morning I discovered history coming to life in ways I had not seen coming when I pulled into town Sunday night.

While on I-10 I had seen a sign for the Annie Riggs Memorial Museum, which sounded so esoteric that I didn't want to miss it.  So Monday morning I went looking for the Annie Riggs Memorial Museum and on the way found the Old Fort.

To a Fort Wayne person, the thought of an "Old Fort" sort of feels like home, so I stopped.  At first I was underwhelmed, seeing a few buildings and a lot of vacant land.  As it turns out, there are seven (of the original 35) buildings; some are reconstructed and a couple are original.  There's also a stagecoach wagon that was used in two John Wayne movies.

Old Fort Stockton

But that's not the interesting part - and it does get really interesting.

Here's the story, which I learned from a very knowledgeable lady named Vicki whom I had to repeatedly ask to stop talking so I could write down all of the history she was telling me:  In the late 1840's, following the Hidalgo Treaty, the U.S. government decided we needed a military presence (originally called Fort St. Gall) to protect stagecoach routes from Indian attacks (and I imagine attacks from your garden variety criminal, as well - to call the area sparsely populated would be to overstate its density.)  The location of Fort St. Gall was established because of its proximity to Comanche Springs, which has since dried up due to drought back in the 1950's and general overuse.

A bit later President Pierce's Secretary of War championed a "camel experiment" at Fort St. Gall, where camels were imported and used rather than horses in the desert conditions of the southwest.  The experiment was actually going quite well and probably would have been continued except the Secretary of War left to take another job.  And since that job was President of the Confederate States of America, one can understand how the camel program got lumped into a bunch of generally bad feelings about Jefferson Davis.  Ix-nay on the amels-cay.  There were Confederate soldiers at Fort St. Gall for a while until they were needed for the Civil War.  Vicki surmises that the Confederates probably ate the camels, since there are no wild camels in the area now as might have been expected if they had been left to their own devices after the soldiers left.

In 1867, the U.S. government had two problems.  First, the Comanche had become disillusioned with U.S. policy toward them (a policy that might be called "overpromising and underdelivering" or might be called "lies") and had started attacking white settlements.  Second, there were a large number of freed slaves with no jobs.  To solve both of these problems, the government established several brigades of African-American soldiers who became known as the Buffalo Soldiers.  This was a name given to them by the Comanche.  People now have several guesses as to the origin of the name, but no one really knows for sure.  The Indians had never seen people with dark skin and tightly curled dark hair before (just as the soldiers, who were recruited from lush places like Louisiana, must have been shocked to see the Chihuahuan Desert which is as desolate a place as I've ever seen).  Vicki said that the Buffalo Soldiers were not particularly well received in Texas, which had been a slave state, but they defended the area courageously and successfully for nearly 20 years regardless.

Of course I had heard of the Buffalo Soldiers before, but I didn't realize where they had been located or what they had done, so it was interesting to actually run across this history.

In the 1880's, Fort St. Gall was renamed Fort Stockton after a hero of the Mexican War, and by the late 1880's the fort was abandoned.  Lumber being hard to come by in West Texas (the wood for the fort had been shipped to Houston and then brought overland for 500 miles by ox-cart), there was a fair amount of reuse of the wood by the settlers.  Some might call that looting, but I won't.

Oh, and when I say "wood for the fort" I really mean the buildings on the fort grounds.  There was never a need for a wall around the installation, because it is impossible to sneak up on it.  Anyone coming will kick up a cloud of dust that the soldiers could see miles away.  Perhaps for this reason, the fort was never directly attacked.

Another interesting thing about the Old Fort is that it was built on leased land.  Remember, in the 1840's, Texas was its own Republic so the U.S. government owned no land in the state.  An enterprising entrepreneur from San Antonio bought land and leased it to the U.S. military.  When the fort was abandoned, the land remained in private hands.  The City of Fort Stockton bought the area in 1981 to undertake the renovation of the fort, and one of the original officer's quarters is still a private home.

Barracks (the railing in the front is just to keep tourists back)

Prison Cell at the Guard House - very creepy

After leaving the Old Fort, I found the Annie Riggs Memorial Museum, which is in the building that used to be the Riggs Hotel.  Now we go from post-Civil War history to the Wild West.  Lorraine at the museum explained that the 13-room building was built in 1901 as the Koehler Hotel and then purchased by Mrs. Riggs in 1904.  It is one of the best preserved adobe structures in the southwest.  In its heyday, the hotel boasted "the coolest rooms in town" due to high ceilings and proximity to Comanche Springs.

Mrs. Riggs had quite a life.  Born Anna Frazier in 1858 near Las Cruces, New Mexico, she married James Johnson at the St. Joseph Catholic Church in Fort Stockton in 1877 - the year that the church was built.  James Johnson was one of the first sheriffs in Pecos County.  The Johnsons had six children but for reasons that remain unexplained, divorced in the late 1880's (I guess that's true of a lot of divorces).  In 1891 Anna remarried, to a gunslinger named Barney Riggs.  (The lore is that Riggs never killed anyone who "didn't need killin'" if that makes you feel any better.)  Anna and Barney had four children and got divorced in 1901.  In 1902, Barney got into a dispute with Anna's son-in-law (from her first marriage) who was serving as trustee for Anna's divorce settlement, and the son-in-law ended up shooting Barney who died the next day in the Koehler Hotel.  (The son-in-law was exonerated based on self-defense.)

Presumably using the proceeds of her divorce settlement, Anna purchased the hotel and ran it until her death in 1931.  In the 1930's and 1940's, the building was used as a rooming house and then in 1955 the family gave it to the Fort Stockton Historical Society to be used as a museum.

House Rules, printed in the local newspaper and now displayed at the museum

The museum itself includes history not just of the hotel but of the community and includes exhibits on the area's Hispanic heritage, cowboy heritage, and archeology, among other things.

The Dining Room of the Riggs Hotel

There was a lot of gunfighting in those days.  It was the Wild West, and Fort Stockton saw at least its fair share.  In 1894, a gunslinger-turned-sheriff was assassinated in his office while sitting at his desk, and his desk (with a drawer that is blood-stained from the shooting) is in the museum.  (The murder was never solved.)  There are a ton of stories that Lorraine and the museum video told me; my memory and space considerations prevent me from retelling them here.  But it's fascinating to stand in a building that was in the middle of such a colorful part of our country's history.

Nowadays Fort Stockton is an oil and gas town.  The Texan Inn & Suites has a sign that says "Welcome to the Oil Capital, USA, Fort Stockton, Texas."  When I stopped to do some laundry, I started talking with a guy who works on the rigs, and there's a sign that says "don't put oil slickers in the machines."  (I never got the guy's name, but he was interesting and hates the New England Patriots more than anyone I'd ever met.  He was pleased to learn that lots of people in Indiana dislike the Patriots as well.)

Anyway, for those of you who care about these things, by the time I left Fort Stockton I'd driven 5,638 miles.  And, of course, gotten a lesson in keeping an open mind.