DUANE
Duane's take
Here's the story as the official marker tells it, and friend, this one earns every word. The Seminole-Negro Scouts — Val Verde County, Texas, and a chapter of frontier history that ought to be told around every campfire from the Rio Grande to the Sabine. The Scouts served with the U.S.
Army at Forts Duncan and Clark and Camp Del Rio, from 1870 to 1881, and in that span they became key figures in ridding Texas of hostile Indians. One hundred scouts. A hundred men with a history as tangled and hard-won as Texas itself — mainly descendants of runaway slaves who had intermarried with the Florida Seminoles, later moved to Oklahoma Indian Territory, and then found themselves in the uniform of the very nation that had once refused them.
Now that's a thing worth sittin' with a moment. The Army valued them — and it wasn't hard to see why — for their uncanny trailing skill, their bravery, and their ability to survive on meager rations during months of tracking. Meager rations, the marker says, and then it goes right ahead and tells you what that included.
Rattlesnakes. Months in the brush, reading ground no one else could read, living off what the land offered whether the land was feelin' generous or not. And then there's this — the detail that lands like a stone dropped in still water.
Over an eight-year span of fighting under Lieutenant J. L. Bullis, not one scout was killed.
Not one. Eight years of frontier combat in some of the hardest country on the continent, and that outfit came through whole. That's not luck.
That's skill, and discipline, and something harder to name — the kind of bond between men that keeps each other alive when everything else is trying to stop them. The marker doesn't explain it. It doesn't need to.
It just states it, plain, and lets you sit with what that means.
What the marker says
Serving with the U. S. Army at Forts Duncan and Clark and Camp Del Rio (1870-1881). The Scouts were key figures in ridding Texas of hostile Indians. The 100 Scouts were mainly descendants of runaway slaves who had intermarried with the Florida Seminoles, later moved to Oklahoma Indian Territory. They were invaluable because of their uncanny trailing skill, bravery, and ability to survive on meager rations (including rattlesnakes) during months of tracking. During an 8-year span of fighting under Lt. J. L. Bullis, not one scout was killed. (1968)