Travel - Fort Davis National Historic Site, Davis Mountains State Park, and the town of Fort Davis

 

This year, for spring break, we decided to focus on areas that were unlikely to be swarmed with people - the more fools us.  It turns out that, in the Plague Times, after a year of being restrained, everything is swarmed.  Our trip began in Fort Davis, a postage stamp of a town located in west Texas, on the edge of the Davis Mountains.  Fort Davis has a wealth of small hotels and tourist amenities, but Sunday is perhaps not the best day to enjoy them.  We found, in the entire town, one open restaurant and one deli or shop - and the restaurant was so overwhelmed that they were warning customers that the wait was an hour or more for food and tables were not to be had at any price.  The deli was nice enough, and prices were reasonable, so we got our food there and ate in our room.

Our room was at the Stone Village Tourist Camp, an old-style motel that might, under other circumstances, remind one of the Bates Motel.  Fortunately, the staff there was friendly and gave plenty of advice about things in the area, even if it was not much use on Sunday, and the room, while old-fashioned and rather spartan, was clean, well-maintained, and all in all very pleasant.  I would recommend them to the traveler looking for an older road-trip experience who is comfortable dispensing with non-essential frills in return for that experience.  I should point out that travelers who are looking for the "standard" travel experience, in a chain hotel, will be sorely disappointed in Fort Davis; all of the hotels in town are various forms of "full of character," from the six rooms above the Fort Davis Drug Store (the restaurant mentioned earlier) to the Limpia Hotel, which is a classic small-town western Grand Hotel.  All in all, Fort Davis, as a town, would doubtless be much more interesting on a day other than Sunday-Monday.

The town serves as the gateway to the Davis Mountains, which host one National Park Service installation, Fort Davis National Historic Site, the best-preserved frontier cavalry post outside of Forts Huachuca and Leavenworth, and one state park, Davis Mountains State Park.  The two are connected by a hiking trail - from which the image above was taken.  This trail is where we spent most of our day, covering about ten miles between the old cavalry post and the CCC lodge at the back of the state park.  During this, in addition to the usual black vultures, we saw at least two ravens (an unexpected sight in Texas, in my experience), a pair of Cooper's hawks, a handful of white-tail deer, and one javelina which wandered through the state park as if it was the most natural thing in the world.  I was reliably told that there were some wild sheep as well, but I did not see either these, or the mountain lions we were warned about.

What I did see is a well-preserved old cavalry post, which once served as the headquarters of the 10th Cavalry Regiment and home to eight of its ten companies under Ben Grierson.  Grierson was a somewhat unusual choice for a cavalry officer; he hated horses after he was bitten as a youth, and though he was entrusted with command of Grant's cavalry in the west, he preferred to ride a mule.  It also gave me an opportunity to observe, just as I once did at a castle in Japan, that all armies have certain features that they always build - quarters, an assembly or drill area, administrative spaces, and work areas.  They haven't changed much since a legionary camp, and in any given period, armies tend to build a handful of easily identified buildings that meet the same needs, on the same plan, across their entire range.  Above, for instance, Officers' Row is on the near side of the parade ground, and two of the four original barracks were restored on the far side of the parade field, with the corrals, paddocks, and warehousing on the far side of that.  One of the features that this picture doesn't show is unfortunate: the multi-story officers' quarters at the end of the parade ground, where officers with families lived, are identical to housing units still in use at Leavenworth and Fort Sam Houston.

The Park Service has several buildings fitted out for exhibits and interpretation, and a couple more in the process of restoration.  The exhibit and interpretation buildings include the old post hospital, an infantry barracks, divided into a company bay and a gear display, and Grierson's restored quarters, showing how he and his family used the space.  One nice touch is that the minutes of the day are regulated by bugle calls, just as they would once have been for troopers stationed there.  It gave me an opportunity to describe how the calls regulated the day, what they meant, and what to expect next.  It also gave us a great way of knowing that we were back from the Fort Davis Death March, and close to our start point once more.

All in all, Fort Davis was a lovely little town, though I would advise visiting on a weekday or a Saturday, with a ton of charm and character, and Fort Davis, the installation, was a well-executed interpretive site taking advantage of a well-preserved old installation.  I shudder to think what it would be like in high summer, but in March, it was quite manageable.  Since it is right next door to the McDonald Observatory, Big Bend, Balmorhea, and Marfa, Fort Davis makes an excellent hub around which to visit many of the odd, off-track towns and attractions of southwest Texas/