Will Croft Barnes: Medal of Honor Soldier, Arizona Cowman and Saver of the Longhorn

Who Was Will Croft Barnes?

Will Croft Barnes was born in San Francisco on June 21, 1858, and died in Phoenix on December 17, 1936. His career crossed three fields that rarely meet in one person: military service, ranching and public land management. The outline here follows the Wikipedia article on Barnes, which carries several citation warnings, so the key points are checked against the Hall of Great Westerners summary.

The Soldier of Fort Apache

Barnes enlisted in the U.S. Army in Washington, D.C., in July 1879 and served in the Signal Corps. On September 11, 1881, during the attack on Fort Apache in Arizona Territory, he escaped the post and rode to Fort Thomas, and soldiers from Fort Thomas came to relieve Fort Apache. He received the Medal of Honor on November 8, 1882, and was discharged as a sergeant in July 1883.

That episode tied him to Arizona, where much of the rest of his life unfolded.

Ranching and Public Life in Arizona

After the army he worked as a rancher in Arizona and served in the Arizona Territorial legislature. The sources I could open give no herd sizes, brands or acreage for his own ranching, so this profile does not state any. What they do show is a man who understood the open range from the inside, and that knowledge shaped the books he wrote.

Forest Service Years and the Last Texas Longhorns

In 1907 Barnes began a 21-year career with the U.S. Forest Service. In that role he is credited with traveling across southern Texas with a companion to find the last remaining Longhorn cattle, which were shipped to the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge in Oklahoma. That herd is a reason the breed survived into the present.

The need was real. Ranchers had been moving away from Longhorns for decades; Henry Hooker, for example, switched his Sierra Bonita herd to Durham and Hereford-grade cattle, and the Empire Ranch was mostly Hereford by 1898, as the Empire Ranch history records.

The Books That Made Him a Source for Historians

Barnes wrote Western Grazing Grounds and Forest Ranges (1913), a history of the open-range livestock industry in the arid West, and Tales from the X-bar Horse Camp (1920). He published The Cowboy and His Songs in the Saturday Evening Post on June 27, 1925, and later served as associate editor of the Arizona Historical Review. Arizona Place Names appeared in the University of Arizona Press edition of 1987, with Byrd H. Granger, and Apaches & Longhorns: The Reminiscences of Will C. Barnes followed in 1982 under editor Frank Cummins Lockwood.

Honors and Memorials

The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum records his induction in its Hall of Great Westerners entry as 1961. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery with his wife, Elizabeth Talbot Barnes. The U.S. Army Reserve Center in Phoenix and a field house at Fort Huachuca carry his name. For more, see the ranching section of farm.FM and a farm.FM story about Longhorns.