Las Moras Springs, named for its mulberries, was a camp of Coahuiltecan people and later of the Comanche and Apache, a stop on the eastern branch of the Comanche Trail into Mexico. On June 20, 1852, two companies of the First Infantry set up camp here on land leased from Samuel Maverick.
Fort Clark's most important soldiers came from Mexico. The Black Seminoles, descendants of people who had escaped slavery and allied with the Seminoles in Florida, had spent twenty years guarding the Coahuila frontier for the Mexican government. In 1870 the army recruited them as scouts at Fort Duncan, and from 1872 until 1914 they served from Fort Clark, under Lt. John L. Bullis from 1873 to 1881. Four of them received the Medal of Honor. In May 1873 Col. Ranald Mackenzie led the Fourth Cavalry and the scouts across the Rio Grande, over Mexico's protests that its sovereignty was being violated, to attack Kickapoo and Lipan Apache villages at Remolino, burning three villages, killing nineteen men and taking forty prisoners. When the unit was disbanded, the 200 to 300 Black Seminoles still at the fort moved into Brackettville, and the scouts and their families are buried in the Seminole Indian Scout Cemetery.
The army left after World War II. The post is now Fort Clark Springs, a 2,700-acre gated resort that welcomes visitors, with a motel in the old cavalry barracks and a pool fed by the springs. The Fort Clark Historical Society runs the museum in the old guardhouse.
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