Fort Bayard was established in August 1866 by Company B of the 125th U.S. Colored Infantry — Buffalo Soldiers — under orders to protect the Santa Rita copper mines and the stage routes running west from Mesilla. The post sat at the edge of the Pinos Altos foothills, with grass for the horses and a creek that ran most of the year.
For thirty years it was a working cavalry post. Companies from the 9th and 10th Cavalry — also Buffalo Soldier regiments — rotated through during the Apache campaigns. Geronimo's final surrender in 1886 was a few hundred miles away, but it took the work of dozens of small posts like Bayard to push him there.
When the Apache wars ended, the Army didn't close Bayard. They converted it. By 1899 it was the first federal hospital in the country dedicated to treating tuberculosis among Army veterans. The dry, high-altitude air was thought to slow the disease — and for many patients it did. The hospital ran continuously until 2010, by which point most of the original frontier-era buildings were gone but the parade ground and several Officer's Row houses survived.
Today Fort Bayard is a National Historic Landmark managed by the state of New Mexico. The grounds are open during daylight hours. Walk the parade ground at dawn and you can still pick out where the stables stood, where the post hospital looked over the valley, and where Geronimo himself was briefly held under guard during transit. Free, quiet, and almost always empty.