As Lieutenant Storey wrote to his beloved Annie, “You have no idea, my dear child, what a life we lead. Worse yet, it was boring, leading soldiers who did not desert to entertain themselves with booze, gambling and frequent violence. They spent their nights in bug-and-rodent-infested quarters with poor ventilation. Their days were largely a monotonous routine of exhausting drills and hard labor fueled by a meager diet of bread, meat and beans. While the commanding officer lived in a comfortable six-room house with his family and their servants, the enlisted men’s experience was not quite so hospitable. Kitchens, storerooms, corrals and a trader’s store rounded out the world of Fort Selden. The west side was the site of a 10-bed hospital with a resident surgeon. To the east was the fort’s sole two-story building, housing administrative offices, workshops, a courtroom and a stone prison. Enlisted men’s barracks stood at the south end of the parade ground facing officers’ quarters to the north. Now quiet and indistinct on the outside, Fort Selden was once a bustling, tree-laden community on the inside, where some 200 men lived and worked. Designated as a New Mexico State Monument in 1974, Fort Selden is now under the umbrella of the Museum of New Mexico, which preserves it as a state historic site with an onsite visitor center featuring exhibitions and living history demonstrations on frontier and military life. military history and the West’s captivating frontier past. Nonetheless, the stories Fort Selden holds and its historic significance as a late-19th century Army fort continue to fascinate visitors who wish to connect to El Camino Real, U.S. While some stone foundations still support walls stretching up to 10 feet high and a few cottonwoods tower overhead in full leaf, most of the fort is eroding back into the landscape it was built to protect.Ī series of 15 to 20 buildings once formed the adobe garrison of Fort Selden, where 200 soldiers lived and worked. The fort’s random collection of crumbling adobe walls and earthen mounds suggests a once-extensive series of 15 to 20 buildings laid out, in traditional military fashion, in a rectangle around a central parade ground. Today, Fort Selden stands as a ghost of itself and their memories in the shadow of the soft-curving Robledo Mountains, whose name honors the fate of Pedro Robledo, a member of the 1598 Juan de Oñate expedition and the first European to die on El Camino Real in what is now the United States. The large adobe garrison was a foreign and lonely place for a New Yorker like Storey and others sent to defend travelers in the tough southwestern terrain from marauding Mescalero and Mimbres Apaches. Infantry and Calvary troops to occupy the fort, including the legendary African American Buffalo Soldiers of the 125th Infantry. Built 18 miles north of Las Cruces on the east banks of the Rio Grande amid the remnants of a precontact Mogollon village, the frontier Army post was established a year earlier in 1865 to protect travelers, traders and others who ventured through New Mexico’s remote Mesilla Valley along El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro. So wrote Lieutenant James Henry “Harry” Storey to his sweetheart, Miss Annie Cheshire of Brooklyn, New York, shortly after his arrival at Fort Selden. Miners that went there, never returned, but we calculate to go there with one hundred men, punish the Indians, and return (some of us)….Buenos Noches, mi Caro Annie, Yours, Harry.” Trappers report that there is any quantity of Gold on a river, supposed to be the Sacramento. We will travel west by north and pass through a country of which little is known. “Dearest Annie: The Commanding Officer is going on a sixty days scout in a few days. #001705)Īn account from Lieutenant James Henry, Fort Selden, New Mexico, October 3, 1866: Photo by Nicholas Brown.Ĭourtesy Palace of the Governors Photo Archives (NMHM/DCA.
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