Page 233 - Cooke's Peak - Pasaron Por Aqui

up in unproductive and exhausting scouting
5 missions.
General Miles kept the heliograph stations in operation after the surrender of Geronimo and the Apaches’ exile to eastern prisons September 8, 1886. Signal Corps records indicate operations until at least November. Post records from Fort Cummings indicate that the last caretaker detachment left there on October 3, 1886.156 However, James H.
later testified that he, as a private, and a detachment
of Thirteenth Infantry remained several months
beyond this time and continued to operate the
157 heliograph.
The heliograph tests conducted in 1890 involved 33 Signal Corps officers, 129 enlisted men, and an un- determinednumberofsupporttroops. Thenetwork of 51 stations spanned 2,000 air miles. During the tests, 3,785 messages, amounting to 92,406 words, weretransmitted. Onemessageof150wordswas flashed from nearly one end of the line to the other, from Fort Stanton to Fort Whipple, with the omis-
162 sion of but a single word, and with few errors.
On October 6, 1891, Secretary of War Redfield
Proctor recommended that Fort Cummings be
closed because troops had been “totally withdrawn”
Green recalled his tour of Fort Cummings clearly. He noted that the Carpenters were still there and that when Sam Carpenter made one of his frequent trips to Denver, Mrs. Carpenter would ask a soldier to use one of her horses to bring the mail
and the army no longer required the use of the 13
158
The Carpenters also sold
installation.
vation be turned over to the Department of the Interior, according to the Congressional Act of July 5, 1884, governing the situation. The following day
164 President Benjamin Harrison concurred.
According to some sources, the 74 bodies on Fort Cummings’ Cemetery Ridge, 25 listed as uniden- tified, were exhumed and shipped to Fort Leaven- worth, Kansas, for reburial in the National Cemetery. 165 The Fort Leavenworth National Cemetery Director, Velva L. Melton, communi- cated that her records do not substantiate this state- ment. Her records indicate that no soldiers from either Fort Bayard or Fort Cummings were reinterred at Fort Leavenworth.166
The whistle of the steam engines, slowly progress- ing across the arid Southwest, signaled the beginning of the end of the Southern Overland Route to California. The steel road paralleled the old ruts for many miles, but the new, more efficient method of transportation tolled the death knell for this road of many names. Travel through Cooke’s Canyon shifted to the new road and railroad and, for future generations, this famous route that had been traveled by thousands of westward seeking people would stand abandoned, neglected, and forgotten. The remaining military posts and fortifications erected along its winding path also would be ter- minally evacuated and fall slowly to ruins as the once proud facilities melted back into the ground from which they had been formed.
up from Florida Station.
the soldiers some tough beef for sue cents a pound.
Green noted that at the end of the summer of 1887, his commanding officer, Colonel Eugene Asa Carr, sent Green to Hachita to take charge of heliograph- ing between that station and Fort Bayard. Green climbed the mountain (possibly Black Mountain) every morning to signal a Private Finnegan at the other end. He did not last long at this location, however. When it became known that Green was also trapping skunks, he was sent back to Fort Cum- mings. It can be assumed that the Signal Corps maintained the heliograph line after Miles no longer needed it. Moreover, the final withdrawal of troops from Fort Cummings occurred about the same time that the post office temporarily terminated its
1
facilities at the post in July 1887.
In 1890 the Army decided to reestablish the
heliograph network for a series of tests. New sites were added to the original network (Figure 60), especially beyond Fort Cummings at the eastern end of line, and 51 stations participated in the test. Al- though some of the stations were operational by May, the Fort Cummings station was set up on
160
line may have influenced the reopening of the Fort
161
December 20, 1890.
Cummings post office in June 1890.
The order to reestablish the
Green
quite
He suggested that the military reser-
Chapter 7
219