Fort Clark Springs
29.306° N, -100.422° W
I slip into the cold of Las Moras Springs Pool,
gliding over the surface as sunlight trembles below.
I hike wooded trails that echo with birdsong.
Colors flash and wings flicker
through the branches overhead.
I drive past the historic quarters on officers’ row,
their porches facing a road once busy with horses.
Inside the museum, medals and faded photographs
lie beneath glass, their owners long gone,
the names of military campaigns still legible.
This was the post of the Black Seminole Scouts,
driven from Florida to Indian Territory,
then fleeing south across the Rio Grande,
where families who had known slavery
made a life beyond its reach.
The Army sought them out for what they knew of the land.
They could read a broken twig, a hoof print in dust,
and find water where a stranger saw only brush.
Then they rode against Comanche, Kiowa, Apache, Kickapoo,
other nations refusing to surrender their homelands.
At the Seminole Indian Scout Cemetery,
I stand in the harsh Texas sun at Adam Paine’s grave:
Seminole Scout, Medal of Honor recipient.
He helped defeat Comanches at Palo Duro Canyon,
and I wonder what his freedom meant beneath an Army flag.
