Volume 31

Table of Contents

Fort Davis Backstage: The Texas and California Stage Stations Revealed, 1875–1895
John Martin Davis, Jr.

Although at least four stage stations and an equal number of stopovers clustered around Fort Davis during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, most are now in ruins or have entirely dissolved back into the earth. Remarkably, one survived hiding in plain sight. The reason is novel. The property was leased rather than sold to the stage company; therefore, it was not recorded in the county deed records, the place where all local histories start. With the Army Post opening in the Apache Mountains by the mid- 19th century, civilian mail and army dispatches were delivered to Fort Davis. The stage stations were soon abandoned or repurposed and forgotten. The last surviving station built by Whitaker Keesey for the Texas and California Stage Company in 1875 was photographed in 1908; the picture, taken from the west, shows the stable, corral, and station house, which was identified in the Fort Davis “Early Homes and Buildings.” Over time, the structure was improved. Many tenants occupied the property, and few, if any, realized it might be the only standing stage depot remaining in West Texas.

Camp Del Rio, Texas, 1875–1923
Thomas Ty Smith

Camp Del Rio, Texas, located four miles from the Rio Grande at San Felipe Springs in Val Verde County, had several additional names by the U.S. Army: Post of San Felipe; Camp San Felipe; Camp U.S. Troops at Del Rio, Texas; and Camp Robert E.L. Michie. San Felipe Springs itself was the crucial military resource—a steady, reliable water source, the third largest spring in Texas in an arid West Texas desert environment. The springs served as an important element of the San Antonio–El Paso military road beginning in 1850 and was established as an Army post by the Buffalo Soldiers of the 10th Cavalry in 1876. In 1881 Camp Del Rio became one of the first Texas frontier posts actually owned by the federal government. Until the Mexican Revolution and World War I, Camp Del Rio generally remained a typical one-company frontier post with six infantry regiments and ten different cavalry regiments providing troops, including the four Buffalo Soldier regiments. At the height of the Mexican Revolution in 1916, Camp Del Rio grew into an Army border patrol district headquarters as well as the regimental headquarters of the 14th Cavalry. During the life span of the post, a number of military notables did duty at Camp Del Rio as junior officers, including Lieutenant General Samuel B.M. Young, Lieutenant General Jonathan M. Wainwright, General Leonard Townsend Gerow, General Walton Harris Walker, Major General Terry de la Mesa Allen, and James H. “Jimmy” Doolittle. In June 1920 the post was renamed to honor Brigadier Robert E.L. Michie. After long service to the nation, the post closed in July 1923.

The 1st Cavalry Division Maneuvers of 1923: The Big Bend and the Last Call of the Old Cavalry
Thomas Ty Smith

Based on a recently donated document to the Archives of the Big Bend, an original copy of the operations order for the First Cavalry Division Maneuvers of 1923, this project traces the history of this milestone event and places it in context from the highest levels of national military policy to the grassroots support and involvement of local Marfa citizens and ranchers of the Big Bend. The First Cavalry Division Maneuvers of 1923 was the first mounted division exercise, as well as the largest concentration of cavalry on U.S. soil since the Civil War. This final operation of large-scale pure cavalry formations for the U.S. Army prior to the wave of mechanization and armor was also the last call of the old horse soldiers on the last cavalry frontier.

Water and Governance in Valentine, 1936–2009
Richard B. Wright

In 1974, Valentine residents submitted a petition to the Jeff Davis County Commissioners Court in Fort Davis, intending to reactivate Valentine’s 1936 order of incorporation by putting the matter to a vote by the town’s citizens. The spur to this action was the desire to improve the local water system; the Farmers Home Administration required incorporation before a loan would be authorized. This paper focuses on these events and how federal expertise and state oversight informed this small com-munity’s town’s projects through the “council of governments” phenomenon emerging nationally in the 1960s–1970s. County governments had long been the political gatekeeper for remote communities in Texas; counties were not even required to submit their annual budgets to the state comptroller prior to 1931. However, Valentine’s desire for improved utilities made it an early example of a small Far West Texas community that benefited from this broader regional and federal dynamic. It has continued to benefit from it into the 2000s.

The Native Mission Site at Polvo
Richard E. Wright

Questions remain about the history of the mission that once existed at the Polvo site along the Rio Grande below Presidio, and also about the history of the Tapacolmes who once inhabited that site. Using known and recently discovered historical sources, this presentation discusses both questions. It establishes that the Tapacolmes abandoned the site sometime between 1689 and 1693, and proposes the late 1730s as the more probable time for the construction of an adobe chapel there.

Mary Macon Kilpatrick Howard: Merchant, Teacher, Landowner, and Administratix
Lisa Zakharova

Mary Kilpatrick Howard (1882-1970) was the first child of J.J. Kilpatrick, a cotton farm owner in Candelaria, Texas who was infamous for his outspoken criticism against the U.S. military presence on the border during the Mexican Revolution. As an in-dependent young woman, Mary was the first Kilpatrick to move to Candelaria, a small village on the U.S.-Mexico border in Presidio County, where she taught in a one-room schoolhouse in 1903. She bought the General Store and hired her teenage brother Dawkins to run it. After her husband, Jack Howard, was killed by bandits in 1913, Mary owned and operated a millinery business in Marfa, raised her two daughters as a single mother, leased real estate in Marfa, and continued to teach for many years. Upon the death of Dawkins in 1947, Mary was given the complicated task of settling the large Kilpatrick estate, most of which was given to her daughters Marion Howard Walker and Frances Eleanor Howard. Mary continued to help her daughters manage the family cotton farm and general store in Candelaria until she was satisfied with their leadership abilities. Mary’s brazen Big Bend pioneer spirit, and determination ensured her family’s success in one of Texas’s most remote landscapes for nearly 100 years.