On May 10, 1860, a group of rowdy miners and adventurers gathered outside the station to plan strategy before riding off to war against the Paiute Indians. They intended to make the Indians pay for killing the two Williams brothers three days before at a trading post up the road. It didn't matter that the brothers had kidnapped and raped two 12-year-old Indian girls.
This time, the drunks from Carson City and Virginia City learned a lesson. Within three days, 76 of the 105 men who fought in the first battle of the Pyramid Lake War were dead. Buckland later described the avengers as men "full of whiskey" who seemed out on a "pony stealing expedition"
rather than a fight to right a wrong. The Paiutes simply stood behind sagebrush and rocks and picked them off one by one.
In a departure from the thinking of the time, Buckland said the killing of the Williams brothers had been justified. "The Williams boys took the squaws into their house and ravished them," he wrote in 1879. "This act greatly incensed the Indians and they in retaliation committed various
outrages on whites."
In response to the Indians' victory, more than 200 regular Army soldiers and 500 volunteers quickly banded in California. They marched to Nevada and within a month defeated the Indians. Soldiers claimed they killed 160 Indians and lost only two of their men. The Indians claimed they lost four.
To keep the peace, the Army that summer hastily constructed Fort Churchill to protect the settlers, the Pony Express and the stage. Fort Churchill remained an Army post for nine years. The primary job of the soldiers became that of ensuring that the Comstock Lode miners stood for the Union cause in the Civil War. Only one Fort Churchill solider died in combat with Indians.
Johnson, who likes to dress in Civil War garb and to address schoolchildren on the fort's history, also blames the whites for the Pyramid Lake War of 1860. "What the Indians did was justified," he said. "It is questionable whether the fort was really needed."
Today only the adobe walls of the fort remain. They are maintained in a state of arrested decay. Masons make new adobe blocks each year for the ruins. Without the masonry work, Johnson said, ruins would disappear within 30 years because of the weather. After Fort Churchill closed, Buckland bought the buildings from the Army for $750. He used
the fort's lumber to build Buckland's Station into its present day character.
The two-story white house became the cornerstone of his ranch, which supplied vegetables and hay to miners and livestock throughout early Nevada. Buckland and his wife, Eliza, are buried at the cemetery at Fort Churchill. In 1884, Eliza Buckland bled to death from a cut she suffered after dropping a pitcher into the bowl in which she was washing her feet. A few months later, Sam Buckland burned to death in a fire caused by the lighted candle he kept next to his bed.
by Michael J. Brodhead, UNR Professor Emeritus in History
At Fort Churchill State Historic Park there is a sign stating that, in August of 1861, the First Regiment of Dragoons became the First Regiment of Cavalry, thereby making the fort "the first post in the nation to have cavalry." Most claims to being a historical first are subject to debate; this particular assertion is completely in error.
From the American Revolution through the War of 1812, the Regular Army usually included at least small mounted units, commonly called "light dragoons." In the strict sense of the term, dragoons were mounted troops who fought dismounted; in the American experience, however, dragoons were, in effect, cavalrymen. In 1833 Congress
created the Regiment of Dragoons, renamed the First Regiment of Dragoons in 1836 when the Second Regiment of Dragoons was organized. Another regiment, the Third Dragoons, existed only during the Mexican War. The Regiment of Mounted Riflemen came into being in 1846. In 1855 Congress established the First and Second Cavalry
Regiments. So, at the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, the Regular Army had five horse regiments. The Third Cavalry, organized in May 1861, brought the number to six, three of them designated as cavalry.
So what happened in August of 1861? On the third day of the month an act of Congress redesignated the First and Second Dragoons and the Regiment of Mounted Riflemen as the First, Second, and Third Regiments
of Cavalry, respectively, and the old First, Second, and Third Regiments of Cavalry became, respectively, the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Regiments of Cavalry.
In August of 1861, Company A of the First Dragoons was at Fort Churchill, the remaining companies of the regiment being garrisoned at various posts in California, Oregon, and Washington Territory. Similarly, at that time the several companies of the other five mounted regiments were scattered throughout the country. (In the nineteenth century it was rare for all the companies of a Regular Army regiment to be at the same place at the same time.) Even if we ignore (which we can't) the fact that the First, Second, and Third Cavalry already existed before August 3, 1861, no one military post could claim to be the birthplace of the cavalry as of that date.
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