Apache Campaigns - Fort Huachuca - U.S. Army

This was at a time when the dispersal policy was being discarded in favor of the concentration
of military forces throughout the West. With railroads simplifying supply lines and troop
deployments, and the Indian troubles subsiding, the War Department felt obliged to officially
adopt the policy of concentration in 1880. The ensuing decade witnessed the abandonment of
countless temporary posts. Of the 111 western posts existing in 1880, only 62 remained in 1891.
Fort Huachuca was among the survivors. An 1889 Annual Report to the Secretary of
War shows accommodations at Fort Huachuca for 24 officers and 420 troops, five times the
original 1877 strength.
As early as May 1882, the quartermaster was ordered to draw up plans and estimates to
lay out Huachuca as an eight-company post, evidence that it was being considered as a major post
in the Army’s future stationing plans in the Southwest.
Receiving an allowance of $57,820 from the War Department on August 17, 1883,
foundations for eleven officers’ quarters were layed during November. All requisitions for
lumber and building materials were shipped from the San Francisco Depot to Huachuca Siding.
The building boom provided employment for 150 civilian laborers, carpenters, bricklayers, and
adobe workers.
One of these laborers was Frank Mengoz, who told a reporter in 1943, at the age of 103,
about his new-found employment.
We, some other prospectors and I, had been down in Mexico. We hadn’t done very well
and were broke. That’s why, shortly after we crossed the border into Arizona, and a very
sorry Arizona it was, that we decided to work for wages and went to Fort Huachuca to build
adobe quarters for the officers.
There was no work to be had anywhere, and when we got to Tucson we discovered that it
was just a little Mexican village where practically no one spoke English. The Army was
recruiting workmen, however, and it took us by train to a little station called “Contention,”
just five miles from the fort.
The fellows in charge of the work there were the meanest bunch I ever saw, and after
obeying several orders to jump and cling to the rafters they were putting in, we all decided that
broken necks would not help in the least in our plan to again reach civilization. I never did
find out how they finished those houses, but it certainly wasn’t with my help.
And besides, there wasn’t a woman on the place. I never married, as I said before, but
somehow I never wanted to stay around a place very long without looking at something
prettier than the faces of those other prospectors I ran around with. 115
In 1881 Capt. E. B. Hubbard was assigned to Camp Huachuca to supervise the proposed
construction and immediately began to wrangle with officers of the garrison. He sought to evict
Lieutenant Hurst, the quartermaster, from his quarters so that he might have them, a normal
privilege of rank in those days, but the post commander, Capt. Tullius Cicero Tupper, turned
down his request because the officers were living in quarters they had built at their own expense.
Captain Tupper suggested to Hubbard in official correspondence that 16" x 17" x 5" adobe brick
moulds could be checked out from the quartermaster’s shop. Hubbard ignored this suggestion
that he build his own quarters and obtained permission to live at Burton’s Hotel further up the
canyon. Tupper and Hubbard had several disagreements about the details of the buildings that
Hubbard was to put up. Hubbard became the post quartermaster on April 10, 1882, after
Tupper’s departure.
All of the present-day family quarters along Grierson Avenue were built in the 1883-84
A MAGAZINE OF THE FORT HUACHUCA MUSEUM
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