Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire The Black Seminole Indian Scout Cemetery

After I left the Border Rally, Google Maps said it was only about forty miles to Brackettsville/Fort Clark (just down the block in Texas terms), said detour adding just 15 miles to my trip back home.

Consider the improbability of 500 Florida Negroes, recently bearing arms against the United States, being allowed in 1840 to remove to the Indian Territory while still bearing arms. But it happened.

Ten years later those same people, subject to incessant slaving raids by surrounding Creek Indians, strike a deal with Mexico; a land grant in return for defense against raiding Apaches, Comanches and Kiowas.

Once again consider the improbability in 1870 of the US Cavalry contracting with around 50 of these Black Seminoles and their families to settle around Fort Clark so as to serve as Scouts. A Frontier saga entirely overlooked by popular History.

Anyways, this has been their cemetery since 1872, maybe three miles south of Fort Clark, not far from Las Moras Creek. I hadn’t stopped in here in about fifteen years.



There are four Medal of Honor winners buried here, the highest per capita of any cemetery anywhere. Did they award that medal more freely during the Indian Wars than they do today? No doubt.

Were these four medals handed out here a sort of 1870’s Affirmative Action program? Prob’ly not, one was recommended by Ranald MacKenzie himself who comes across as a no bullchit kinda guy. The other three were recommended by a Captain Bullis, in gratitude for them saving his life in the face of heavy Comanche fire after his horse ran off. Medals or not, these guys were the real deal.



It ain’t very often you come across an account of Indian War Era PTSD…..

On May 17th, 1873, Colonel MacKenzie’s command crossed the Rio Grande….. After a forced march of approximately eighty miles, travelling all night at a “killing pace”, the four hundred or so men struck the Lipan, Mescalero and Kickapoo settlements… early the next morning…

As the battle raged about him, Seminole scout Tony Wilson had a Lipan in his sights. Just as he squeezed the trigger, his target threw up an arm revealing that she was female. The carbine cracked, and the woman fell dead.

Wilson was reportedly haunted for the rest of his life by this error in judgement. It eventually made him insane.

I always hope this guy is resting in peace.