Fort Selden & El Camino Real — Buffalo Soldiers and the Royal Road

The eroding adobe ruins of Fort Selden rise from the desert just north of Las Cruces, a frontier Army post established in 1865 to protect settlers and travelers of the Mesilla Valley and the Camino Real. For decades it was garrisoned in part by the Buffalo Soldiers — the celebrated African American regiments of the post-Civil War Army — who patrolled against raiders and escorted supply trains across the Jornada del Muerto. The fort's most famous resident was a boy: Douglas MacArthur, the future five-star general, lived here in the early 1880s while his father, Captain Arthur MacArthur, commanded the garrison, and he later wrote that he learned to ride and shoot before he could read or write. Interpretive panels wind among the melting adobe walls and parade ground, and the small visitor center holds artifacts and photographs that make the isolation of frontier soldiering vivid.

The tiny community of Radium Springs takes its name from the mineral hot springs that once drew health-seekers to a resort beside the Rio Grande in the early twentieth century, back when radioactivity was marketed as a cure. The springs and the old bathhouse have long since faded, but the settlement remains a quiet farming crossroads where the river narrows against desert bluffs — the same natural pinch point that made this a strategic ford on the Camino Real and the reason Fort Selden was placed here. Stretch your legs on the fort's outer grounds and river overlooks, where the Robledo Mountains frame the valley and the old wagon route is easy to imagine threading the gap below.

Perched on a bluff above the Jornada del Muerto north of Radium Springs, this dramatic modern interpretive center tells the story of El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro — the 1,600-mile 'Royal Road of the Interior Land' that linked Mexico City to the Spanish colonial capital at Santa Fe from 1598 for more than two centuries. It was the lifeline of colonial New Mexico, carrying settlers, missionaries, soldiers, silver, and trade goods across one of the most feared stretches of desert in North America, the aptly named Jornada del Muerto, or 'Journey of the Dead Man.' The center's galleries use maps, artifacts, and oral histories to trace the road's impact on Native, Spanish, and Mexican communities, and its windows frame the actual wagon route below. The architecture alone — a long steel-and-glass form riding the ridgeline — rewards the drive out.