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TODAY Wednesday 7 May 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: Fort Davis, West Texas

The best way to approach the old cavalry post at Fort Davis, Texas -- right by the little town after which it is named -- is by foot, over a high ridgeline that a hiker can follow from the state park about five miles to the northwest. The ridge affords magnificent views of the other hills in the Davis Mountains and of the vast dry ocean that surrounds the mountains, making of them an island redoubt, the easternmost extension of the Rockies. Off to the south, visible from here, is the Big Bend of the Rio Grande. This is the west of West Texas.

You can count on this view because visibility is rarely a problem in the Davis Mountains. No trees to speak of, no moisture in the air. And a small and scattered human population whose artificial light barely disturbs one of the most dramatic night skies of North America. The University of Texas built its observatory here, and you see why a half hour after sunset: a sky of blackest black with more stars than you have ever seen, sharp bright stars that are almost menacing, so clear and close do they pulsate.

Fort Davis is in the news today because some militia group holed up there, and the Texas Rangers ended up shooting at least one of them as he tried to flee into the mountains. The group had seceded from the United States and declared themselves to be the Republic of Texas, although it's not clear whether their agenda was crazy-white-people politics or a scheme to write bad checks. So these days in the paper one can read familiar bylines, filing reports dateline Fort Davis, Texas, a tiny speck of a town if ever there was one.

It's no knock of those reporters and their editors to suggest that in pursuit of a white supremacist headline story, they brushed past a moving, more important but older story of darker skinned people, their cultures, and their landscape.

In the early 19th Century, West Texas was part of the extensive domains of the Mescalero Apaches. Though they maintained villages and grew food by the Rio Grande, they were avid hunters and superb horsemen, well adapted to wresting sustenance from the begrudging lands north and south of the river. The horses had come, ultimately, from the conquistadores, and the Mescalero Apaches had adapted other elements of Spanish civilization. They took Spanish names (think of Geronimo), they spoke Spanish as a second language, and wove into their spirituality many of the myths and iconologies of Mexican Catholicism. But that they "belonged to" the Mexican Empire mattered to them as little as that they "belonged to" the Anglo-Saxon republics who defeated that empire.

After the Civil War, the US national government resolved to exercise its authority over the vast, hitherto under-administered lands won from Mexico some twenty years earlier. The Mescaleros were a problem in that regard, for they recognized no sovereignty but their own, on either side of the border. They were armed (with rifles), they were motivated, and they were good shots. If anyone brought some food or supplies in or near their lands, they tended to grab them.

As any moviegoer knows, this is the time for the US Cavalry. And a cavalry post was indeed established (Fort Davis). Its mission was to show the flag to Mexico and pacify the Mescalero Apaches. What was unusual -- and what makes this story poignant -- is that the Fort Davis troopers were all black men. These were the famous Buffalo Soldiers, and you can go today to the reconstructed post and see their Spartan barracks, with saddles poised at the foot of the bed.

For years these African American men chased and harried the Mescaleros. Only gradually did they learn the secrets of where to hide and how to eat out in the wild. The Mescaleros frustrated them, and resisted and resisted. Picture those mounted brown-black men riding through canyons in pursuit of mounted brown-red men, the operation conducted in the name of the power of white men, justifiable, if at all, by the beauty and promise of the Declaration of Independence and the abolition of slavery.

The story, on one level, ends with the transfer of the Buffalo Soldiers a few years later and the flight and inevitable subjugation of the Mescaleros. But still today in Fort Davis there are more brown faces than white, more Spanish than English, and only a scattering of human settlements in that severe landscape under the unforgettable sky. There are many advantages to being an American instead of, say, an Englishman. One of them is that our domain includes places like the area around the Davis Mountains, much as it has been for tens of thousands of years. Another is that we are peoples of all the world, inextricably, wonderfully bound together in a great experiment of history.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE

We're particularly grateful to Doug Foy for his Op-Ed on snow tires. Everybody in our business knows that big four-wheel drive sport-utility vehicles (SUVs) are environmentally disastrous and comically overequipped for 90% of their owners. But it took Doug to remind us that we already know how to handle the limited problems of traction faced by snow-anxious suburbanites anywhere north of Washington, DC. Humble, underwhelming snow tires.

Never underwhelming, frequently humble, Foy has run the Conservation Law Foundation of New England for more than twenty years. When he's had to be adamant and tough (stopping offshore oil drilling), he has been. But perhaps his signal contribution to the environmental movement has been his tendency to put himself in the shoes of the people whose behavior he wants to modify. Doug delights in finding shared interests and common ground, and his record with utilities and state governments is imaginative and distinguished. He is the pragmatist's pragmatist, but never adrift from his ideals. It's great to have him.

 

5/06: Europe (yawn)
5/05: Divorce, Mothers, Equality
5/02: Killer Grannies and the Highway Bill
5/01: China
4/30: Pity the Mangrove
4/29: Grizzlies off Battery Park
4/28: Mighty Monsanto
4/25: Growth
4/24: Refrigerator Wars
4/23: The Day the Earth Day Stood Still
4/22: Doorman Ecology
4/21: Toyota Steps Out
4/18: Victims of Extremism
4/17: Our White Guy Problem
4/16: Coca-Cola and the Merrit Parkway

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