Fort Garland housed infantry and cavalry units, and during the 1870s the famed Buffalo Soldiers, African-American cavalrymen, were also posted there. For soldiers and their families, life at Fort Garland was often dull, sometimes dangerous, but never easy, and one civilian visitor remarked that although frontier life suggested a poetic expansiveness, to the soldier it usually involved a career of humdrum routine. To protect the San Luis Valley's Hispanic settlers against Indian attacks, the U.S. Army established Fort Massachusetts in 1852 near Blanca Peak just north of this place, but that fort was too remote to be effective, so in 1858 the Army built Fort Garland. Built largely of adobe, Fort Garland stood guard over the San Luis Valley and its people until it was abandoned in 1883.