Buffalo Soldier Tragedy of 1877
Morton, Cochran County, Texas
Marker Inscription
African American troops, known as Buffalo Soldiers, were vital in defending the Texas frontier. On July 26, 1877 Buffalo Soldiers from Co. A of the 10th Cavalry began to pursue a Comanche party. During the pursuit, the Comanches led the troops away from water holes as the expedition traveled through Cochran and other counties. After Several days without water, Capt. Nicholas Nolan led his dehydrated soldiers and remaining animals back to Double Lakes in Lynn County; they arrived on July 30, having gone 86 hours without water. Several soldiers left camp in search of water and four died during the expedition: Pvt. John H. Bonds; Pvt. Isaac Derwin; Pvt. John Isaacs; and Pvt. John T. Gordon. (2008)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In the summer of 1877, troopers of Company A, 10th Cavalry—the African American Buffalo Soldiers who helped guard the Texas frontier—set out from their posts to pursue a Comanche party across the arid Llano Estacado. The Comanches drew the column away from every water hole, and after days in the heat Capt. Nicholas Nolan led his parched men and animals back toward Double Lakes, having gone 86 hours without water. Four soldiers who wandered off in a desperate search for water never came back.
Why it matters
The ordeal records both the punishing service of Black regular soldiers on the western frontier and the human cost of the Indian Wars that decided who would hold the southern plains.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
After the Civil War, the United States turned its army toward the West, and the southern plains of Texas became one of the last great contested grounds between the government and the Native nations who had ruled them. The Comanche in particular were superb horsemen and knew this country — the vast, nearly featureless tableland and its scarce water — better than any soldier ever could.
Into this campaign rode a new kind of American regular: the African American cavalryman. Organized after the war, these Black troopers earned the name Buffalo Soldiers and were posted to some of the hardest and most dangerous duty on the frontier. They patrolled enormous distances, escorted travelers, and pursued raiding parties across land that punished men and horses alike.
The summer of 1877 caught them in the cruelest feature of that land: its thirst. On the high plains, water was not a convenience but the difference between life and death, and an enemy who understood the country could turn its dry distances into a weapon far deadlier than any rifle.
People & events
On July 26, 1877, Buffalo Soldiers of Company A, 10th Cavalry, set out after a Comanche party and began a pursuit that would become an ordeal. As the chase led them across Cochran and neighboring counties, the Comanches drew the soldiers away from the water holes, deeper into dry country, until the troopers' thirst became desperate.
Captain Nicholas Nolan finally turned his suffering command back toward Double Lakes, in Lynn County. When they reached it on July 30, they had gone eighty-six hours without water — more than three days under a plains sun, men and animals alike pushed past the edge of endurance.
In that extremity, several soldiers left the camp in search of water, and four of them did not survive the expedition: Privates John H. Bonds, Isaac Derwin, John Isaacs, and John T. Gordon. The marker records their names, and their names are what remain — four men who died not in a battle but in the simple, killing struggle to find something to drink.
Its place in the American story
The story told here belongs to two of the great threads of American history at once. It is part of the record of the Buffalo Soldiers — the Black regulars who served the nation on its harshest frontier in the very decades when their people were still denied so much of the citizenship they were defending. Their endurance here is a testament that reaches far beyond this patch of Texas.
It is also part of the long, hard reckoning of the Indian Wars, the struggle that decided who would hold the southern plains. This episode captures that conflict at its most elemental: not a clash of grand armies but a contest of knowledge and survival, in which the land itself became the deciding force.
And it is a memorial in the truest sense. Four soldiers died in service, far from home, in a way that offered none of war's usual consolations of glory. Remembering them — by name, by the plain facts of what they suffered — is the nation's acknowledgment that such service and such sacrifice were real, and that they counted.
If you visit
Come here mindful that this is a memorial, and give it the quiet it asks for. There is no battlefield to walk, no fortress to tour — only the marker, the wide sky, and the enormous, level country stretching in every direction.
Let that landscape tell the story the words begin. The very openness that makes these plains beautiful is what made them deadly in 1877: distances that swallow a rider, and water that hides for miles. Try to imagine crossing this ground for more than three days with none to drink, and the ordeal stops being a line on a plaque and becomes something you can nearly feel.
Most of all, read the four names slowly. That is what this place exists to preserve. On a road trip across the West Texas high plains, this is a stop that rewards a few unhurried minutes — a chance to stand where the land is unchanged and to remember men whose service the country chose not to forget.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Capt. Nicholas Nolan
- · Pvt. John H. Bonds
- · Pvt. Isaac Derwin
Related events
- · Nolan Expedition of 1877
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Route of Nolan Expedition
Meadow, TX
In July 1877, Captain Nicholas Nolan led some sixty Buffalo Soldiers of Company A, 10th U.S. Cavalry—joined by 22 buffalo hunters who called themselves 'The Forlorn Hope'—onto the parched Llano Estacado in pursuit of Comanche raiders. Eluded by their quarry and finding the water holes dry, the men went 86 hours without water, surviving by drinking the blood and urine of their horses before staggering back to a supply base. All but four soldiers lived through the ordeal.
One of the Trails of Col. Ranald S. MacKenzie
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In the summer of 1872, Col. Ranald S. Mackenzie of the U.S. Army marched 240 men and eight officers along the draw near this spot as part of the Army's campaign to force Native peoples off the Texas frontier. His swift, secret movement toward New Mexico aimed to break up a network of traders who paid Indians to raid settlers' cattle and horses. The track his soldiers beat across the plains served later scouts and settlers and is still remembered as Mackenzie's Trail.
General Ranald Slidell Mackenzie
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A New York-born officer who rose to major general in the Civil War, Ranald Slidell Mackenzie took command of the 4th Cavalry in 1871 and led it in a series of campaigns across the Llano Estacado against the Comanches, Kiowas, and Southern Cheyennes. His surprise attack on villages in Palo Duro Canyon on September 28, 1874—where his troops captured and destroyed some 1,424 horses—left the Southern Plains tribes without the means to resist. Their forced move onto reservations opened West Texas to white settlement.
Buffalo Soldier Tragedy of 1877 in Lynn County
Tahoka, TX
After the Civil War, African American "Buffalo Soldiers" patrolled the western frontier, and in July 1877 Company A of the 10th Cavalry set out from Double Lake in pursuit of a Comanche party. The Comanche drew the troopers away from water, and the soldiers endured extreme heat and 86 hours without water; horses and mules died and men became lost searching for springs. Four soldiers died on the expedition, including Pvt. John T. Gordon, buried at Double Lakes.