Philip St. George Cooke gave his name to these springs in 1853, when the former commander of the Mormon Battalion explored the region with the 2nd U.S. Dragoons. The spring became a crucial waypoint on the Southern Emigrant Trail and later the Butterfield Overland Mail stagecoach route. From 1858 to 1861, the Butterfield company operated Cookes Spring Station near the water source. But the springs sat at the eastern mouth of Cookes Canyon, which led through Cookes Pass, a narrow gap in the Cookes Range. After the Bascom Affair of 1861 poisoned relations between the Apache and Americans, warriors who had been friendly to the stage company turned hostile. They destroyed stations, attacked coaches, and killed hundreds of travelers over the following years.

The California Column arrived from the west in 1862-1863, Union volunteers marching to secure the Southwest for the federal government during the Civil War. Captain Dresher and Company B of the 1st California Infantry established Fort Cummings near the old stage station. Over the following decade, the fort grew into a proper adobe installation: 10-foot-high walls enclosing a parade ground, corral, and single-story buildings. The mission was clear, to control the Apache and protect the southern overland road to California where it passed through Cookes Pass. For travelers who had learned to fear this stretch of trail, the fort represented a measure of security in dangerous country.

The soldiers who served at Fort Cummings came from units that tell the complex story of the Civil War-era American West. California volunteer infantry companies rotated through in the early years. Company D of the 125th Infantry Regiment U.S. Colored Troops garrisoned the fort from August 1866 to October 1867, one of many Black regiments serving on the frontier after the war. The 38th Infantry and 24th Infantry followed. Cavalry detachments from the 3rd Cavalry patrolled from the fort between 1866 and 1870. Each unit left its mark on the post records, scouting the surrounding territory, escorting wagon trains, and occasionally clashing with Apache bands.

By 1870, the immediate Apache threat had diminished enough that the Army evacuated Fort Cummings to caretaker status. Complete abandonment came in 1873. The adobe walls began their slow erosion back into the desert. But peace proved temporary. In 1880, the Chiricahua Apache leader Victorio launched a devastating campaign against white American settlers across southern New Mexico and west Texas. The Army returned to Fort Cummings, designating it Camp at Fort Cummings from 1880 to 1884. The 4th and 8th Cavalry regiments used the site as an operational base during campaigns against Victorio and later Apache resistance. A final reoccupation in 1886 addressed renewed troubles before permanent abandonment.

Today Fort Cummings exists as eroding adobe walls rising from the New Mexico desert 20 miles northeast of Deming. The nearby site of the old Butterfield stage station and a post graveyard to the south complete the historical complex. The springs that made this location vital still flow, though the desperate travelers and hostile warriors are gone. The fort never saw the dramatic sieges of other frontier posts, but it served its purpose, making the most feared passage on the trail from Mesilla to Tucson marginally safer for those who had to cross it. The ruins stand on the New Mexico State Register of Cultural Properties, a monument to the brief years when holding this water source meant holding the road west.