Living the Sweet Life at Fort Bowie
War, Ice Cream, and Cold Beers in the American West
It’s summer 1888. You’re a private with the 4th Cavalry stationed at Fort Bowie, high in Apache Pass in Arizona Territory. The Apache Wars are over and life is good. Very good.
You remember 1886 as the year the Apache Wars ended and 1887 as the year the fort got its ice machine. It’s the thing — using a nearby spring, a man-made reservoir, and a steam engine — that lets you enjoy ice cream and, on a really hot day, cold beer. You find yourself with some free time, a rarity even with active campaigning at an end with Geronimo’s surrender. Do you wander up the fort, to gaze at Major Beaumont’s two-story Victorian mansion? Or should you mosey over to the bar, the one tucked into a nice, quiet corner of the Sutler’s Store? Maybe you could challenge one of the non-coms to a game of tennis at the new court.
Yes, it’s 1888 and you’re a cavalry trooper in the high mountains of Arizona, but this is the good life. One might even say, ice cream in hand, that it’s the sweet life.
It’s winter 2024. I found myself at Fort Bowie National Historic Site, one of the least visited sites within the entire National Park System — this includes everything: parks, monuments, battlefields, historic sites, etc. By the numbers it received exactly 8,333 visitors in 2023. To put that number in perspective, two of the most notoriously difficult-to-reach National Parks in the country — Kobuk Valley and Gates of the Arctic, both in Alaska — had more visitors than Fort Bowie. To top it off, Fort Bowie is the least visited National Park site in Arizona.
And it's literally only miles away from the vineyards and tasting rooms of the Willcox American Viticultural Area. What I’m saying is, is that it’s a little out of the way, but it’s far from remote. Nor is it inaccessible. The site has a park ranger, one who raises and lowers the fort’s American flag every single day. Really, the perception is that Fort Bowie is hard to reach — not that it actually is.
It’s our perception or assumption about something, historical or otherwise, that can linger. For example, when we think of “Fort Bowie” and “Arizona” we might think of any number questions or musings like: Was Fort Bowie named after Jim Bowie of the Alamo? Or maybe it was named after his knife. It’s a fort, so it must have been built for a war, right? If it’s in Arizona, it’s definitely surrounded by desert. And maybe: why put a fort so high up in the mountains anyway?
Good questions all. I asked myself the same ones. The answers are: No, it was named after George Washington Bowie, a soldier who came from California by way of Iowa. And, related to that, no it was not named for the Bowie knife. Yes, it was built for one war and ended up serving in two. No, this particular stretch of territory is not desert, but a mix of grassland, chaparral, and riparian woodland. And finally: It’s as high up as it is because, during frontier times, the pass was a short-cut to Tucson and had several freshwater springs — for years the Apache used the pass as a source for water, firewood, and good hunting.
And one assumption we’ve made, straight off the bat, is that there was only one Fort Bowie when, actually, there were two. One was, more or less, an ad hoc encampment thrown-up during 1862 — think hillside dugouts covered with tarpaulins. While you may assume the fort was constructed to handle the threat of Hank Sibley and his “secesh” troops trying to make Arizona Territory confederate, it was actually built to defend the pass from attacks by Apache warriors — specifically those under Cochise. Confederates, if they had been the first ones through Apache Pass, would have been forced to do the same thing since the warriors of Apacheria fought everyone: settlers, immigrant caravans, Mexicans, Union soldiers and Confederate soldiers alike.
The second and, arguably more permanent, Fort Bowie was under construction by 1868. While the war was over between Union and Confederate, it was not over between the Apaches and the world. Even with a temporary halt to the conflict between 1872-1876, the war between the United States and the Chiricahua Apaches (whose homeland lay in eastern Arizona) continued for another decade until Geronimo’s surrender in 1886. The fort would remain garrisoned until its closure on October 17, 1894.
In that short history, we see immediately how wrong some of our assumptions are: there were multiple forts at the same site, not just one; the fort may have been built during the American Civil War, but it was to keep the Apaches (and not Confederates) at bay; the conflicts that swirled around it ended, but the fort remained for nearly a decade.
Even for a fort in the hinterlands, the living was surprisingly good in the late 1880s — and I’m not just referring to the ice machine wondered-at by our 4th Cavalry private. The fort had a school-house, a library, and a bar for the grunts and non-commissioned officers. The Sutler’s Store, where the bar was, also featured a pair of rooms just for the officers: a club room designed for drinks and card-playing, and a separate billiards room. The place even had a pair of water closets for when nature telegraphed.
If you were an officer at Fort Bowie then things were even sweeter. The fort held five adobe-walled officers quarters, each with a kitchen, sink, and washroom. Although the fort’s alkaline soil made growing crops a challenge, there was enough room behind each building for a garden. In 1886, cottonwood trees were planted to shade the buildings along this rather homey Officers Row. As a bonus, a tennis court was installed near the fort’s central parade ground.
If you were the fort's commander, you were guaranteed fine living in a 13-room mansion near the base of Bowie Peak itself. The building, originally designed as a duplex, featured a drawing room and a separate sewing room, complete with its own skylight. There was also a dining room and seven bedrooms. The exterior included two verandas with plenty of space for relaxing on cooler summer evenings — hardly the tough living one expects on the frontier.
If anything, Fort Bowie near the end of its life was refined. Excluding the daily dress parades, it could probably be said that things were getting rather casual. It must have seemed like a kind of Eden, albeit covered in cottonwoods and beargrass. When one takes into consideration the surrounding ranches, towns, and homesteads, Fort Bowie almost transforms into a pleasantly rustic American Berchtesgaden — except instead of the Alps, it’s nestled between the Dos Cabezas and Chiricahua Mountains.
And what about our typical trooper from earlier? Well, if he had stuck around as a 4th Cavalry soldier for another decade — like Henry Ware Lawton, who served with the 4th during the hunt for Geronimo — he would have found himself in the Philippines in 1898, fighting against a different type of native: this time a Filipino one.
It is a strange thing that we can connect the life of Fort Bowie to both the Apache Wars in the American West and the final act of the Spanish-American War in Southeast Asia. Yet our perception of the Old West as just the Old West would prevent us from even looking for or considering such a connection. But regardless of our perceptions, history has made these connections for us — whether we ever know it or not. That’s history for you.
That was a fun read. Enjoyed immensely.