Remember Camp Logan?

After we'd been walking single-file along the muddy, jungelike path for maybe half an hour, Louis Aulbach said, "Huh, I think I missed a turn."

That startled me: I thought if anyone could find the ruins of Camp Logan, it would be Louis.

Louis and his partner, Linda Gorski, are writing a book about the place, the enormous World War I training camp that's almost disappeared from Houston's collective memory. Louis literally drew the map of Camp Logan's remains - or at least, the map used earlier this year to designate its three significant sites as a State Archeological Landmark. As vice president of the Houston Archeological Society, he leads winter forays to those spots.

Besides all that, he knows his way around the outdoors: He's written a half-dozen guides to canoeing Texas rivers, and has just finished a guidebook to hiking trails in Big Bend.

Louis, the photographer and I stayed on the trail a while, just to be sure. "It's easier to find in the winter, when there aren't so many leaves," Louis said.

Finally we doubled back. We walked up steep hills and down: thrilling bayou-land topography in this otherwise flat city. At least once, we made a complete circle, passing a distinctive vine-covered clearing yet again.

I decided not to worry. The October day was gorgeous. Louis was telling interesting stories. And how lost could anyone possibly get in Memorial Park, smack in the middle of the Houston metropolitan area?

Louis looked intently at the occasional red plastic ribbon, trying to guess whether it marked a mountain-bike trail or indicated the path that we wanted. "The reason that lots of archeological sites have lasted so long," he said, "is because they're not easy to find."

Forgotten

I'd called Louis because, after nearly a century of being forgotten, Camp Logan was suddenly newsworthy.

About a month ago, I started following a proposed flood-control project for Buffalo Bayou. The Memorial Park Demonstration Project, as it's called, is a big deal: It would reshape the banks of the bayou for the mile and a half that it winds past River Oaks Country Club, the Hogg Bird Sanctuary, a residential neighborhood and Memorial Park's wild southern edge. The project would change the bayou's course, widen its channel, raise and lower its banks, fill in an oxbow, change a tributary, and strip away enormous amounts of vegetation. The difference would be visible from outer space.

The Harris County Flood Control District (along with its quiet partners, the River Oaks Country Club and the City of Houston) argues that there's a desperate need to reduce erosion and improve the water's quality. Encouraged by the U.S. Corps of Engineers, the district applied for a relatively speedy permit - one used for noncontroversial projects, one that doesn't require public meetings.

But this wasn't a noncontroversial project. In protest, the Sierra Club called a meeting of its own. "We do not need to destroy the bayou to save it!" said one flier. Conservationists worried about the habitat that would be destroyed, and were not comforted by the flood control district's example of the kind of native plantings it planned to do. A letter-writing campaign urged the Corps of Engineers to say no.

Which it did. Harris County Flood Control and its partners will have to apply for the regular, slower kind of permit. In the letter denying the speedier permit, the Corps mentioned "many public interest concerns." But the main reason the letter cited wasn't environmentalists' concerns; there was nothing about native plants or habitat or park usage.

The main reason was archeological. The giant flood-control project was delayed by stuff that most Houstonians have never seen, remains of a place that most never knew existed.

The riot

Odds are, if you've even heard of Camp Logan, it's because of the Camp Logan riots - which happened not at Camp Logan but in Houston, before Camp Logan was built.

In April 1917, the U.S. entered World War I. The country wasn't yet a global power, wasn't yet a military power, but it set to work quickly. Noting Harris County's warm climate and the presence of its new Ship Channel, the War Department ordered the construction of two bases: Ellington Field and Camp Logan, a place to train the soldiers that the United States had begun to draft.

In late July, a battalion of African-American soldiers arrived in Houston to guard the Camp Logan construction site. About a month later, one of those soldiers tried to intervene when he saw police officers assaulting and arresting a black woman, dragged partially clothed from her house. The police beat and arrested the soldier, too. That afternoon, when a corporal from the base tried to investigate the arrest and arrange for the soldier's release, the police beat, shot at and arrested the corporal, too.

A race riot ensued - a riot that involved 156 armed black soldiers marching on the city, and left 20 people dead.

Many historians, Louis included, prefer to call it "the Houston Riot," but that name never really stuck. In the Houston psyche, it's the Camp Logan Riot. The thing we remember about the place is something that didn't happen there.

The War to End All Wars

"There it is," Louis said, nodding to a big gray concrete thing: the ruin that we'd come to see, the remains of an abutment for the bridge over the bayou's surprisingly steep banks, remains that looked like low walls from a house. There's a surviving concrete pier from the bridge, too, Louis said, but it's in the bayou, and only visible when the water is low. He figures that the flood-control project would almost certainly remove the pier in the water. If the earth-moving plans wiped out the abutment too, they'd destroy most of the site - one of the three that are all that are left of Camp Logan.

I stared at the abutment, trying to get my head around the size of the bridge that used to be there. The bridge was 186 feet long, Louis said, 26 feet wide and rose 25 feet in the air. It connected the two sides of Camp Logan.

"The camp was on both sides of the bayou?" I asked. Now I was trying to get my head around the size of the camp.

"Oh, yes," Louis said and pulled out a map. The enormity of the camp shows just how quickly the United States threw itself into becoming a military power, a world player. The camp sprawled over 9,560 acres; the developed area covered 3,002 acres. Distances inside it were measured in miles. The main part of the camp was in what's now Memorial Park; the artillery firing range is in what's now Addicks Reservoir.

The camp's tents could house 44,899 men - this, at a time when the population of Houston was around 100,000.

Besides the tents, there were 1,329 buildings: headquarters, a base hospital, multiple post offices, a library, Knights of Columbus halls, a YMCA and even a YWCA where female visitors could meet the soldiers. There were barns, motor pools, mess halls, bakeries, a movie theater, canteens and latrines.

And there were grimmer things, too. On one of the other archeological sites, Louis told me, are the barely visible remains of the trenches where the soldiers trained: the place where they prepared themselves for what was then a new, deadlier kind of warfare, one in which soldiers on each side sheltered themselves in dugouts protected by barbed wire, howitzers and machine guns. On the front, to leave your trench was to risk death.

The Illinois National Guard's 33rd Infantry Division trained at Camp Logan, then arrived in France in June 1918. They fought in the Muese-Argonne offensive, the battle of the Argonne forest, part of the major offensive that broke the German army's will to continue. It was the U.S. Army's largest and deadliest commitment of troops. In the 33rd Division alone, 6,173 men were wounded, 691 killed.

We all know that the War to End All Wars didn't end them all. We all know that war now as World War I; in our minds, it seems to lead inevitably to World War II. But that wasn't how it seemed at the time. Americans wanted to believe that the nation would never again plunge itself into Europe's troubles. Camp Logan was first turned over to the U.S. Public Health Service and later deserted, its land sold off to developers Mike and Will Hogg. Part of that land became what's now the ritzy River Oaks sudivision. Part of it the Hoggs sold at a sweet price to the city of Houston with the condition that it become a park.

Memorial Park, to be precise: a memorial to the soldiers who trained there, who risked their lives when their country called. These days, most of the park's runners and golfers have no idea that those men, and that camp, were ever there. It's a memorial that forgot the thing it was supposed to remember.

"Oh!" said Louis, suddenly pulling a GPS from his pocket. Memorial Park is undertaking a grand new master plan. He'd like to think that the bridge's remains will survive any flood-control plans, and that they could become part of a history trail devoted to Camp Logan.

He clicked, recording our coordinates. Next time, he'd remember.