The Seminole Scouts

Seminole Canyon is not named for anyone who lived in it. It takes its name from the Black Seminole Indian Scouts, descendants of people who had escaped slavery in the American South and found refuge among the Seminole in Florida, then went by way of Indian Territory to Mexico. The United States Army recruited them in 1870, and from 1872 they were based at Fort Clark, seventy miles east at Brackettville. They patrolled the border country between the fort and the Pecos, and camped in this canyon by a spring. They never numbered more than a few dozen at a time, and four of them received the Medal of Honor. Three earned theirs in a single fight, at a crossing of the Pecos on 25 April 1875. Four men under Lieutenant John Bullis caught up with a party of twenty five or thirty Comanche driving stolen horses, and were driven off. Bullis was cut off from his mount. Sergeant John Ward turned back alone and hauled him up behind the saddle, two men on one horse, while Trumpeter Isaac Payne and Private Pompey Factor held off the pursuit; a bullet cut the sling of Ward's carbine and another shattered its stock as he pulled Bullis up. Their families farmed along Las Moras Creek at Fort Clark, and their descendants still keep the cemetery there and gather at it every September. The Army disbanded the detachment in 1914 and ordered the families off. The land they had been promised never came.