This story was originally published by Source New Mexico.
Patrick Lohman
Source New Mexico
Just after a Civil War infantry re-enactment during Fort Stanton’s annual celebration, as Mescalero Apache dancers suited up for a warrior dance, the fort’s manager Oliver Horn stepped onto the stoop of the site’s old guardhouse in order to address a few dozen people gathered there — some of them costumed like Union soldiers.
“There was a real chance that we would have lost this amazing location of such rich New Mexico heritage and culture and history if it wasn’t for them,” Horn said, gesturing to a group of firefighters from different agencies lined up on either side of him. “We would not be here.”
Horn’s words on Aug. 23 referenced the Camp Fire, which had burned during Memorial Day weekend a few months prior and threatened to destroy the historic site.
First established in southeastern New Mexico in 1855 as a base to ward off Mescalero Apache raids, Fort Stanton since that time has hosted an array of historical figures like Billy The Kid and Kit Carson. Buffalo Soldiers posted there; tuberculosis patients received treatment in its halls; and the United States interned German sailors there during World War II.
This year’s annual celebration acknowledged much of that history, but Horn also took a moment to honor more than a dozen firefighters from local, state and federal agencies who represented the 150 or so who responded to the blaze. He presented them with plaques commemorating their “exemplary actions in protecting and preserving the culture and history in New Mexico,” in an effort he said amounts to the largest firefighting operation to save a cultural resource in New Mexico history.
After honoring the firefighters, Horn walked from the guardhouse across the fort’s courtyard, where the Buffalo Soldiers regimental band once practiced, and entered its chapel, first built in 1913.
There, amid the periodic booms of cannon blasts from the other side of the courtyard, he presented to a handful of attendees his approach to keeping the fort resilient to wildfire despite being in one of the most “fire-prone areas in New Mexico.”
While the firefighters’ work on the Camp Fire was crucial, the fort still stands today, Horn contends, due to a multi-agency effort over the past few years to protect it from wildfire and counteract mistakes made over the last couple centuries. It’s an effort he thinks serves as a model for others trying to protect cultural resources amid increasing wildfire risk, and has improved safety ratings, he said, for the area’s volunteer fire department, which keeps homeowner’s insurance affordable in a county where prices are skyrocketing elsewhere.
“Essentially our water system, our infrastructure, helps protect nearly a billion dollars in private property in this county,” he said. “What I’m hopeful for is that if we can execute this project, it will be a model for other communities across New Mexico to establish defensible space for themselves.”
While the project Horn embarked on is making significant progress, he said, much is left to be done, including restoring an acequia irrigation system surrounding the courtyard and removing a stand of dead and dying Siberian elms: “noxious weeds” that can catapult any wildfire into the historic buildings Horn is trying desperately to preserve.
So Horn said he panicked when he got the call about the wildfire barreling toward Fort Stanton. His mind flashed to the elms. He thought to himself, “I just need a few more years.”
Holding the fort
It was about 4 p.m. on Sunday, May 24 when a nearby landowner spotted smoke at the Fort and called 911. Jake Canavan, chief of the volunteer Lincoln Fire Department, showed up a few minutes later, followed by Lincoln County Manager Arron Griewahn, who took over command of the situation.
According to public records, firefighter accounts and Horn’s eyewitness testimony, Griewahn and Canavan then paged firefighters across the county, reporting that a northeasterly wind pointed the blaze directly at the fort. About 50 local volunteers arrived quickly, and the State Forestry division, which is building its own teams of professional fire crews, dispatched two engines from its headquarters in nearby Capitan.
Federal agencies, including the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, heard about the fire over the radio and dispatched teams from the nearby ranger office in Ruidoso. One of those teams was a helitack Hotshot crew from Mississippi that was deployed to high-fire-risk areas.
About 150 firefighters ultimately mobilized to fight the blaze, which quickly spread more than a mile toward the fort, crawling along the Rio Bonito valley lined with dry grass, junipers and piñons.
Within hours, the blaze descended one side of a valley, rushed toward the Rio Bonito and destroyed three historic buildings, including a gymnasium used by interned German soldiers and two wooden structures the Civilian Conservation Corps built in the 1930s.
If the fire had kept going up the other side of the valley, it would have fed on an outcropping of dead or dying Siberian elms that were first introduced during the Dust Bowl, launching it further toward the fort.
Just beyond the elms sat the rest of Fort Stanton’s historic buildings, many of them with wood shake roofs. Canavan said a single ember on one of those old roofs could have destroyed the entire fort.
“It would have caught some of those wood shake shingles on fire,” he said. “Once one of those buildings goes, it’s gonna be a bad day.”
But no ember made it past firefighters, Canavan said. They stood on the edge of the ridge with the blaze below them and the fort behind them. They had quick access to all the water they needed, thanks to the hydrants, and the helicopter pilot from Mississippi had access to a nearby dip site Canavan previously staged there.
Even with the blaze only 4 percent contained on May 26, incident commanders reported that fire lines had held, sparing the fort any further damage. By May 29, the blaze was 87 percent contained and largely out.
The fire burned about 875 acres. Its cause is still being investigated.
A fire ‘170 years in the making’
Once the fire was out, Horn — who was born and raised in Albuquerque but drawn to Fort Stanton after getting a Ph.D in history from Georgetown — wrote an essay laying out what he saw as the long threads of history that culminated with the Memorial Day weekend conflagration, a fire he sees as “170 years in the making.”
Horn maintains that the buildup of fuels in the area has largely been uninterrupted since Carson’s troops forced the Mescaleros to Bosque Redondo in 1862. The thinning and other work in the area is vital, he says, to restore the landscape to the way it looked for thousands of years, when the Mescaleros regularly used fire on the landscape.
A photograph, circa 1870, shows a band of Mescalero Apaches outside the newly built fort. Open grassland surrounds it. Horn attributes that emptiness to the longstanding Mescalero practice of setting fire to the grassland, which burned dead plant material, provided nutrients and prevented large-scale fires.
The Mescaleros were enduring “hellish” conditions at Bosque Redondo between 1862 and 1865, according to Horn, and never returned to the grasslands after they left the forced reservation. Instead, the Mescaleros moved into the safety of the mountains nearby, what is now the town of Mescalero.
In doing so, they surrendered the grassland below to ranchers, who introduced tens of thousands of cattle to the landscape.
“And so what the cattle did is they started feeding the grass, and they tore up the grass, which created space for those saplings to take root and expand. And these forests, whether piñon-junipers down here in the lowlands, or the Douglas fir forests up in the mountains, started to increase in density,” Horn said during his presentation.
Enter the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, which prompted the United States Agriculture Department to introduce the drought- and cold-resistant Siberian elm, which has since reproduced around the fort.
Today, a photographer capturing an image from the same vantage point as the photographer did back in 1870 would see a landscape cluttered with piñons and junipers, along with a build-up of Siberian elms around the fort’s perimeter, all desiccated by drought or riddled with disease and, as a result, rendered highly combustible.
“The USDA had the best of intentions at the time in terms of planning these Siberian elms,” Horn said. “Today, communities across New Mexico are trying to figure out ways to get rid of these trees. They are highly, highly invasive.”
‘It felt good to win’
The state’s Department of Cultural Affairs has invested about $8 million in capital projects recently, including $3.5 million on upgrading the water system. Improvements include replacing the visitor center’s old wood shake roof with synthetic material and installing 17 fire hydrants; and they have a plan and a $300,000 federal grant to replace invasive Siberian elms with native oaks.
The Bureau of Land Management has also conducted multiple thinning and prescribed burns in the area in recent years, including in the area where the Camp Fire burned between May 25 and 30. According to a Source New Mexico review, the BLM has done more than 140 fuel treatments in the area since 1995; more than a third of those were in the last five years.
Subsequently, Fort Stanton’s survival stands in stark contrast to other recent Lincoln County disasters. The McBride Fire in 2022, along with the South Fork and Salt Fire last summer, continue to wreak havoc on the Ruidoso area about 20 miles south of the fort, where deadly post-fire flooding occurs each monsoon season and homeowners insurance rates are growing increasingly unaffordable.
Canavan told Source that, as a result of fire hydrants and recent investments, a half-dozen homeowners approached him this summer and told him that they’d actually gotten rebates from their insurance companies, “which is unheard of,” he said.
In addition to the recent investments, Canavan cited the quick mobilization of firefighters as the reason they were able to save the fort.
And he and Griewahn also noted the thinning in the area, which helped them hold the fire “in check” and “get around it,” Griewahn said, pointing across the Rio Bonito, at a sparse array of slightly charred junipers and a landscape that bears the closest resemblance in the area to Horn’s old pictures of the pre-fort desert.
Griewahn, who has been in the thick of those natural disasters, told Source that the fort’s survival is worth celebrating.
“I don’t want to use the wrong term, so to speak. But it felt good to ‘win,’” Griewahn said as he looked out over the Camp Fire burn scar, which stopped a few hundred feet from where he stood. “For us to get a fire stopped, and for us to meet our objectives and save all these buildings, it felt good to finally win.”
After looking at the burn scar, Griewahn and Canavan returned to the fort’s courtyard, taking shade under an antique fire truck next to a group of Civil War re-enactors, who were taking down their tent at the end of a long and festive day.
They watched children playing tag across the historic courtyard, running under an American flag lightly flapping in a mild breeze.
