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Why would an Army fort on the Texas frontier be built without a wall? In episode 156 of Wise About Texas, recorded live at the Young County Museum of History and Culture in Graham, Texas, host Ken Wise talks with Jim Hammond, director of Fort Belknap near Newcastle, about the 1851 post that became a crossroads of North Texas on the Butterfield trail and the Goodnight-Loving Trail. Hammond describes a soldier’s life that was far more monotonous than the movies suggest—until it wasn’t. He then takes listeners through the Elm Creek Raid of October 1864, when Comanche and Kiowa warriors crossed the Red River into a Young County emptied of most of its men by the Civil War, and the story of Britt Johnson, the man he calls his “hero of the frontier.” Listen to the full episode to hear how one small fort shaped the Texas frontier.
