Seminole-Negro Scouts
Del Rio, Val Verde County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Serving with the U. S. Army at Forts Duncan and Clark and Camp Del Rio (1870-1881). The Scouts were key figures in ridding Texas of hostile Indians. The 100 Scouts were mainly descendants of runaway slaves who had intermarried with the Florida Seminoles, later moved to Oklahoma Indian Territory. They were invaluable because of their uncanny trailing skill, bravery, and ability to survive on meager rations (including rattlesnakes) during months of tracking. During an 8-year span of fighting under Lt. J. L. Bullis, not one scout was killed. (1968)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
From 1870 to 1881, roughly a hundred Seminole-Negro Scouts served the U.S. Army along the Texas border at Forts Duncan and Clark and Camp Del Rio. Mostly descendants of runaway slaves who had intermarried with Florida Seminoles before removal to Indian Territory, they were prized for extraordinary tracking skill, courage, and endurance on the trail. Under Lieutenant John L. Bullis they fought for eight years without losing a single scout, and four earned the Medal of Honor.
Why it matters
The scouts embody a remarkable convergence of African American and Native American history in the frontier army, whose courage went long unrecognized in the story of the American West.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
After the Civil War, the U.S. Army returned to the Texas frontier with a difficult mission. Along the Rio Grande and across the arid country west of San Antonio, raids crossed back and forth over the international border, and troops stationed at small posts struggled to follow raiders across vast, dry terrain.
Forts Duncan and Clark, along with Camp Del Rio, guarded this stretch of the border. It was hard country: brush, canyons, rocky ground, and long distances between water sources. Conventional cavalry often could not keep up with the people it pursued, much less find them.
The Army's answer was to recruit scouts who knew how to read the land. Beginning in 1870, it enlisted men from a remarkable community whose history stretched from Florida through Indian Territory and into northern Mexico.
This was also the Reconstruction era, when the meaning of freedom and citizenship for Black Americans was being fought over across the country. The scouts' service on the frontier unfolded against that larger national struggle.
People & events
The scouts' story began generations earlier, in Florida. People who escaped slavery found refuge among the Seminoles, and over time the two communities became closely bound together, through intermarriage among other ties. When the federal government forced the Seminoles west, these families went too, to Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma.
Their freedom there was never secure. Many of them eventually moved on into Mexico, and from there the Army recruited them to serve in Texas. About 100 men enlisted as scouts between 1870 and 1881, working out of Forts Duncan and Clark and Camp Del Rio.
They became legendary for their tracking. They could follow a trail others could not see, keep going for months on meager rations, and live off the land, rattlesnakes included. Under Lieutenant John L. Bullis, who led them for eight years of hard campaigning, they fought in many engagements and not a single scout was killed, an extraordinary record for frontier service.
Four of the scouts received the Medal of Honor for their courage. Yet after their service, the community struggled for years to secure land and the recognition it had been led to expect, and that painful chapter is part of their story too.
Its place in the American story
The Seminole-Negro Scouts sit at a crossroads of American history. Their story combines the history of slavery and self-emancipation, the forced removal of Native nations, and the military frontier of the American West.
They also complicate the familiar picture of the frontier. The Army that fought Native peoples in Texas relied on scouts who were themselves descendants of enslaved Africans and Seminoles, people forced from their own homes by the same national expansion. The marker speaks in the language of 1968, calling the Army's opponents "hostile Indians." Today many historians describe these wars as a tragedy for every Native nation involved, and the scouts' story is part of that difficult history.
Their record, including four Medals of Honor and eight years without the death of a single scout under Bullis, stands among the most remarkable in the history of the frontier army. For a long time, though, it was overlooked in popular accounts of the West.
Today their descendants and historians keep the story alive, a reminder that the American West was built by far more diverse people than the old legends suggest.
If you visit
Stand at the marker in Del Rio and look out at the country around you. Heat, brush, and distance shaped everything about the scouts' work, and even from a car you can feel how hard it would have been to track anyone across it.
This is border country with deep layers of history. Del Rio sits beside the Rio Grande, and the posts named on the marker are within reach: Fort Clark at Brackettville to the east and Fort Duncan at Eagle Pass to the southeast.
If you continue to Brackettville, look for the Seminole Indian Scout Cemetery, where many scouts and their families are buried, including Medal of Honor recipients. It is one of the most moving places connected to this story, so visit quietly and respectfully.
A drive linking Del Rio, Brackettville, and Eagle Pass follows the scouts' old territory and makes a strong day of frontier history in southwest Texas.
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
- · Lt. John L. Bullis
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Seminole Indian Scouts' Cemetery
Brackettville, TX
Established on the Fort Clark reservation in 1872, this cemetery holds the graves of the Seminole Negro Indian Scouts and their families. Descendants of Seminoles and formerly enslaved people who had come from Florida around 1850 and lived in Mexico and Texas, these scouts served under Lieutenant John L. Bullis and Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie in the frontier campaigns of the 1870s, and four of them earned the Medal of Honor.
John Horse
Brackettville, TX
Born in Spanish Florida in 1812 to a Black mother and a Seminole father, John Horse became a leading figure among the Black Seminoles during the Second Seminole War, fighting alongside Chief Coacoochee before serving the U.S. Army as scout, interpreter, and mediator. Repeatedly pursued after his people's freedom was stripped away, he led followers out of Indian Territory in 1849 toward sanctuary in Mexico, resting near Las Moras Spring in 1850 and later settling at Nacimiento in exchange for guarding the border against Apache and Comanche raids. He survived an ambush near this site in 1876 and died in Mexico City in 1882.
Fort Clark
Brackettville, TX
Established in 1852 beside the springs of Las Moras Creek, Fort Clark guarded the military road from San Antonio to El Paso and the border with Mexico. Nearly every U.S. cavalry regiment passed through, and its garrison — including the Seminole-Negro Indian Scouts and the Buffalo Soldiers of the 10th Cavalry and 24th and 25th Infantry — played a decisive part in the Indian campaigns of the 1870s. Held briefly by Confederates during the Civil War, the fort remained a horse-cavalry post until 1946.
Seminole Scout Camp on Fort Clark
Brackettville, TX
For decades the descendants of Africans who had fled slavery for Spanish Florida — where they joined the Seminole people and forged the distinct Black Seminole community — carried their hard-won freedom across the continent. After removal to Indian Territory and a sojourn in Mexico, one group crossed back into Texas in 1870 to serve the U.S. Army as the Seminole-Negro Indian Scouts. They made their home at 'the camp' on Fort Clark, building jacal houses and digging irrigation ditches along Las Moras Creek while scouting the border country until their disbandment in 1914.