In Texas: the Uses of Yesterday

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The post hospital burned down long ago. So did Officers' Quarters No. 5. But the 21 remaining limestone buildings at Fort Concho—the enlisted men's barracks, the two-story headquarters that dominates the parade ground, the officers' row—all glint beige-red in the West Texas sunset as they did 100 years ago.

Complicated historical ghosts inhabit the place. In the 1870s the fort was the headquarters for the U.S. Army's District of the Pecos. Across this territory over the centuries, Comanches and Kiowas and Kickapoos, Mexicans and Spanish and the other European strains all foraged, collided, killed, displaced, settled. Among the ghosts, a historical curio: the "Buffalo Soldiers," black cavalry troopers, ex-slaves mostly, who were recruited after the Civil War and sent west to help the whites get established in the inhospitable vastness. After 20 years, the work was done. In 1889 the troopers mounted up and rode away from Fort Concho for the last time, while the regimental band played The Girl I Left Behind Me. Four years later, Frederick Jackson Turner proclaimed his elegiac thesis that the frontier, the decisive molding influence of the American character, was gone.

Today, in Officers' Quarters No. 7, John Vaughan, 46, director of Fort Concho, plots an act of historical conjuration. "As it was, so it shall be," says a card that decorates the blueprints on his office wall. Vaughan, a 6-ft. 6-in. Tennessean with a voice that sounds like an intellectual version of the old Gunsmoke deputy, Chester, speaks with a sort of loving surprise about the fort. A skilled stonemason and carpenter, as well as historian, Vaughan came to San Angelo from Alabama last year. He wants to build a reproduction of the Fort Concho hospital and install the elementary school there, tearing down the school that now stands in the middle of the old parade ground. The old fort buildings will be occupied by a fine arts museum, by civic groups and even lawyers' offices. But Vaughan wants to remove the outward appearances of the 20th century—the asphalt streets and overhead phone lines, for example—and bring back nearly everything except the bugles and the intense boredom the soldiers suffered 100 years ago when they were not banging up and down the High Plains or getting drunk in San Angelo.

The fort will have to be a labor of tourism as well as historical piety, of course. Since the Bicentennial, Americans have become great refurbishers of the past, though often in a merely Disney way. They want the past to speak to them; but, especially in the '60s and '70s, it occurred to many to wonder whether the past was telling them the truth. John Wayne repeatedly re-enacted one version of the Fort Concho mythology, but the claims of other perspectives have been rising. Wayne Daniel, 38, Fort Concho's librarian and archivist, speaks wistfully about including disparate points of view in the restored fort—perhaps inviting Indians down from Oklahoma to help prepare exhibits. But most of the Indians were either extinguished or driven onto reservations generations ago. The blacks who served at Fort Concho were transients there and mostly illiterate. Even in San Angelo they have left few traces.