Fort Davis and the McDonald Observatory, Texas

After visiting Big Bend National Park, we headed north and camped near Fort Davis.

Fort Davis, TX 1 May 01

Established in 1854, the fort was named for Secretary of War Jefferson Davis.  It was built to protect the San Antonio – Franklin [now El Paso] Road which was heavily traveled after the discovery of gold in California.

Although the fort had over four hundred enlisted men and officers, they were relatively ineffective protecting the 600-mile-long road against Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache raiders.  It was not until after the Civil War, that extensive scouting excursions aided by modern technology – the telegraph – began to limit the First American raids.

Federal troops left the fort with the onset of the Civil War, but it was reestablished in 1867.  Ironically, after a new law in 1866 allowed black Americans a permanent place in the United States armed forces, the fort, named for the man who became President of the Confederacy, was manned by black “Buffalo Soldiers.”

The fort did not have a wood stockade so often seen in movies.  The mere size of the force kept the enemy at bay.  A few restored buildings remain, and there was an interesting video describing the fort’s history.  But my clearest memory is of sitting on the porch of a building while they reproduced the sounds of an actual 1875 retreat parade [the assembly of the forces at the end of the day].  We heard the commands, the horses, the band and bugles, and the equipment passing by.  It was not hard to “see” it as we sat there.

A “star party” at the nearby McDonald Observatory gave visitors simple instruction in astronomy and let us look through four telescopes at the moon and several stars including a cluster of about a million that looked like a fuzzy dot.  I was interested that light from the moon took a little over a second to arrive; from the sun 8 minutes; and from Jupiter on that day about 45 minutes.

McDonald Observatory 2 May 01

We went back the second night to the Observatory for a very interesting tour which included the 107-inch telescope and the then new 433-inch Hobby Eberly telescope.  The 107-inch telescope was reduced in effectiveness to about 102 inches by seven divots produced by nine-millimeter bullets fired into it by a disgruntled employee who went gone on to do other things, probably as a postal worker.  They also told us about an excited astronomer who got the whole staff up at three in the morning because he thought he had evidence of extraterrestrials; he was informed a firefly was inside the telescope.

The 433-inch was built with stock parts including fans from Walmart, kit structures usually used to hold roofs, a kit dome by a company that built radar domes, a steel framework built by a company that built bridges, and it moved on industrial air bearings that worked like hover crafts.  At a cost of $13 million, it could cover eighty percent of the sky at about fifteen percent of the normal construction cost.

McDonald Observatory 2 May 01

Click on photos to enlarge.

Date of our visit: 1-2 May 01