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Survey of Historic Sites and Buildings
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FORT RICHARDSON
Texas
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Location: Jack County, on U.S. 281, southern edge
of Jacksboro.
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This fort, the most northerly in a line of Texas
forts and one of the most important in the region during the post-Civil
War era, helped replace prewar Fort Belknap. Founded in 1867 not far
below the boundary of Indian Territory (Oklahoma), Fort Richardson was a
key defense bastion against the Kiowa and Comanche raiders who swept
eastward from the Staked Plains and south ward from their reservations
in Indian Territory to prey on Texas settlers. It also guarded the
stagelines running westward to El Paso over the old Butterfield route.
In time, with Fort Sill, Okla., and other forts, Fort Richardson ended
the Indian threat on the southern Plains.
As raids into Texas from Indian Territory accelerated
in the ear1y 1870's, mainly because of the launching of President
Grant's Peace Policy at the Oklahoma reservations, the wrath of settlers
mounted. Yet Fort Richardson's busy garrison, whom the Peace Policy
prevented from pursuing marauding Indians beyond the Red River boundary,
could only rely on such defensive measures as providing escorts for
travelers and sending out large scouting parties.
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The hospital, one of the
surviving buildings at Fort Richardson. (phot Russell Jones, Jack
County Historical Society) |
In 1871 the settlers gained a chance to vent their
emotions. At Fort Sill General Sherman arrested the Kiowa chiefs Satank,
Satanta, and Big Tree, who in May had led a war party that had wiped out
a wagon train near Fort Richardson and the adjacent town of Jacksboro,
and took the unprecedented step of sending them to Fort Richardson for
imprisonment pending a civil trial in Jacksboro. Satank was shot en
route while trying to escape. The trial demonstrated the wide variance
in attitudes of frontiersmen and eastern humanitarians and attracted
national attention. To frontiersmen, it marked perhaps the first
instance of Indians being tried by a civil court and implied that in the
future they might be judged for their crimes by the white man's
standards rather than their own.
At the end of the trial the judge sentenced the two
chiefs to death by hanging. Federal officials, however, influenced by
humanitarian agitation, first pressured the Governor of Texas into
commuting the sentences to life imprisonment at the Huntsville, Tex.,
penitentiary; and, after the chiefs had served only 2 years, into
freeing them. On their return to the Fort Sill Reservation, the Kiowas
and Comanches intensified their raiding.
Yet the Texas settlers had gained some revenge in the
trial and imprisonment. The Government in Washington, which had been
convinced the Peace Policy was working and had usually ignored pleas for
help from military officials and settlers, was also probably better
aware of their need for protection. And General Sherman had begun a
series of aggressive campaigns that would before long reverse the Peace
Policy, subdue the Kiowas and Comanches, and open western Texas to
full-scale settlement. Col. Ranald S. Mackenzie's 4th Cavalry, assigned
to Fort Richardson, began the punitive actions with an 1871-72 campaign
onto the Staked Plains. The final thrust came in the Red River War
(1874-75), in which the fort served as a troop depot and its garrison
participated in many engagements, including Mackenzie's victory at the
Battle of Palo Duro Canyon. Following the war, the need for Fort
Richardson declined. For a few uneventful years, its troops patrolled
along the Red River and escorted cattle drives northward. In May 1878
they abandoned the post, which then served for a short time as an Indian
school.
Fort Richardson is now a 41-acre State historical
reserve, administered by the city and the Jack County Historical
Society. Although urban and industrial development have encroached on
the site, seven original buildings remain in various stages of
restoration, reconstruction, and repair. The hospital building, built of
native sandstone, is the central feature. It houses a museum, the
historical society offices, and an archives room. Other stone structures
are the morgue, where Satanta and Big Tree were confined awaiting trial;
bakery; guardhouse; and powder magazine. One frame officers' quarters,
1-1/2 stories in height with dormered windows and wide porch, has been
restored. A sandstone commissary warehouse, originally connected with
another by a frame shed and now an abandoned ruin, is separated from the
restored fort by a railroad track.
NHL Designation: 11/27/63
http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/soldier-brave/siteb33.htm
Last Updated: 19-Aug-2005
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