On August 16, 1870, at Fort Duncan on the Rio Grande, Maj. Zenas Bliss had John Kibbetts sworn in as a sergeant and ten of his men as privates, the first of the Seminole Negro Indian Scouts. They came from Nacimiento in Coahuila, where their people had lived for twenty years after leaving Indian Territory under John Horse, called Juan Caballo in Spanish, and the Seminole leader Wild Cat. Mexico had used them as militia against Comanche and Apache raiders, and the Army wanted the same skills. Kibbetts enlisted believing the Army would give his people rations and land. No written agreement survives.
Four medals
The scouts moved to Fort Clark in 1872, and from 1873 Lt. John L. Bullis led them through some twenty-six campaigns. Four men earned the Medal of Honor. Pvt. Adam Paine, whose surname is also spelled Payne, was cited for his service to Col. Ranald Mackenzie in the Red River War in September 1874. On April 25, 1875, near Eagle's Nest Crossing on the Pecos, Bullis and three scouts attacked a band of Comanches. When his horse broke away, Sgt. John Ward, Trumpeter Isaac Payne and Pvt. Pompey Factor turned back under fire and took turns carrying him out. Paine did not live long on his medal. On January 1, 1877, a Brackettville lawman, Claron Windus, shot him while looking for him as a murder suspect. Ward died in 1911.
The land
The promise went nowhere. Kibbetts and Caballo began petitioning in 1873. The Army had classed the families as Indians, but Indian agents doubted it, and the Army, the Indian Bureau and the Interior Department argued over who would pay. Rations were suspended and crops failed on the post. Kibbetts died on September 7, 1876. White neighbors around Brackettville pressed for the scouts' removal so the land under their families could be sold, and confrontations with John King Fisher's gang ended in the deaths of some scouts. Bliss, Bullis, Mackenzie, Col. Edward Hatch and Gen. Philip Sheridan all pushed for a title in Washington, and none came. When Bullis was transferred in 1882, the force shrank and the families' rations were slashed. Bullis, for his part, had been buying West Texas tracts as investments, and he later grew wealthy from them and from a silver mine.
1914
The last sixteen scouts were mustered out in August 1912, and by then many destitute families had gone to Del Rio, Eagle Pass and other border towns for work. In 1914 the Army formally disbanded the detachment and the people left on Las Moras Creek, where they had built jacal houses and dug irrigation ditches, were made to leave. Between 200 and 300 settled in Brackettville. Historian Kevin Mulroy has called the expulsion the final expression of the government's treatment of the Black Seminoles. The four medal winners are buried in the Seminole Indian Scout Cemetery, a family burial ground kept by descendants rather than a stop.
You can meet this history at Fort Clark and the Old Guardhouse Museum in Brackettville, run by the Fort Clark Historical Society, or at the Fort Duncan Museum in Eagle Pass, where the first scouts enlisted.