Letters from our readers Let’s talk about Fort Bragg

To the Editor:

I’m going to keep my opinion to myself, my face expressionless, my fidgeting to a minimum here at this historical poker table, but I want you to know that I have this line, this ace to bring out when I need to: “rounding them up and driving them like cattle.”

Now to my neutral stance on the subject of the renaming of Fort Bragg to something, anything, less Fort Braggish.

Fort Bragg, CA, is not named after Braxton Bragg, North Carolina born and both United States Army officer and Confederate general. Fort Bragg, CA is named after the fort that was named after Braxton Bragg, who at the time of the founding of the fort — 1857, four years before the start of the Civil War — had not yet turned to fighting to preserve slavery.

Fort Bragg the fort is there to be seen in Fort Bragg the place, or a partial recreation of it is.

Fort Bragg the fort was built more or less in the center of the Mendocino Indian Reservation to (I don’t want to put down my ace yet)…. To assist in protecting the Pomo from the settlers and the settlers from the Pomo. Oh, the heck with it. What Fort Bragg the fort did was serve as a center for punishing and “rounding up” the Pomo and “driving” them onto the Round Valley Reservation, opened the year before. Early Military Posts of Mendocino County says “All troops stationed at the fort…operated against hostile Indians to the north as far as Shelter Cove and northeast to the South Fork of the Eel River and Long Valley.”

In 1861, Lieutenant Edward Dillon wrote from the fort that settlers familiar with the terrain and who had signed up to assist the soldiers as “90-Day Guides,” were stealing children.

When Bragg joined the Confederacy, there was a “period of agitation” among the soldiers garrisoned at the fort about the name. The commander of the 2nd Infantry California Volunteers wrote the fort “has long enough borne the name of a traitor,” but the name was not changed during the Civil War.

It should be said that Braxton Bragg was not in the United States Army when he joined the Army of the Confederacy. Bragg served the Confederacy as Commander of the Army of Mississippi, later the Army of Tennessee.

Fort Bragg the fort was abandoned in 1864. The Steamer Panama picked up the Fort Bragg garrison on Oct. 18 and arrived at the Presidio in San Francisco on Oct. 20. “Thus was completed the permanent evacuation and abandonment of the post.” (Early Military Posts of Mendocino County)

Fort Bragg the place became a town 25 years later, in 1889.

Fort Bragg the fort from it’s founding in 1857 to it’s closing in 1864 was the green zone for the one-sided fight going on in the woods and closer down on the Noyo River, the profitable mill site snatched out of Pomo hands. The 25,000 acres that was to be turned over to the Indians when the Mendocino Indian Reservation was disbanded. It went the way of all land in such cases, including the land on the Round Valley Reservation; it gets “acquired.”

The land on the coast atop the headlands and east to the dark woods went to settlers for $1.25 an acre.

A few minutes on the internet reveals Braxton Bragg fought against the Seminoles in the Second Seminole Wars, the Mexicans in the MexicanAmerican war, and the Union in the Civil War.

He was at the battle of Shiloh, Murfreesboro, Chattanooga, Chickamauga., Bentonville. He was routed by Grant at Chattanooga, and pushed back into Georgia. He was considered one of the worst Confederate generals, his losses principle factors in the ultimate defeat of the Confederacy.

I don’t know enough to say he owned slaves, but his wife did. She was an heiress to a sugar plantation in Louisiana. He resigned from the Army in 1856 to become a sugar cane plantation owner.

I’m going to say that again: he owned a sugar cane plantation; in Louisiana. In 1856.

Braxton Bragg never visited Northern California or ever saw Fort Bragg, town or fort.

Two paintings of Fort Bragg the fort were painted in 1858, and one of them was sent to Bragg. His wife reported it destroyed in the house fire when Grant and the Union Army came through in 1864.

The naming of towns after military installations that were there first, is not new. Some may be glad that a local area near Ukiah was not named after a fort that for just under a year was there in 1859 on the eastern side of the Russian River; that Redwood Valley was not named Fort Weller.

The concern was the Indi