The incorporation of North African soldiers and veterans into the administrative apparatus of European empires in modern North Africa is a well-documented feature of colonial rule. This can easily seem to be an extension of the ongoing accommodation of some North African men with the political status quo. Such acts of accommodation, as Maghraoui writes of Moroccan colonial troops, were typically hailed and appropriated in colonial discourse, and condemned as collaboration or ignored by nationalist historiography, where a more nuanced account would land somewhere in between. Mohammed ben Driss (b. 1839) was one such individual whose life is a case study in imperial accommodation and the ambivalent histories of North African soldiery in European colonial armies. Born to an elite family near the eastern Algerian town of Biskra just after the French conquest, Ben Driss joined the spahis at 16, served in eastern Algeria, and won promotions for valiant service outside Paris during the Franco-Prussian War. He then participated in the suppression of a large anti-colonial revolt in the Algerian province of Constantine in 1871. In the aftermath, captain Ben Driss became agha of Touggourt, a Saharan oasis town, in 1872, a position which he held until 1879. The standard historical narrative of this peripheral figure has assumed his assimilation into the French colonial order: a spahi-turned-agha married to a European, Ben Driss was appointed and fired by the French, and naturalized as a French citizen in 1879. Yet during his rule, he embarked on an ambitious programme of political centralization and environmental transformation in the region around Touggourt. Furthermore, his appointment in 1872 could also be read as a French compromise with a powerful family network in a region where the imperial footprint was minimal. Laying out a new, revisionist biography of the spahi captain, this paper explores the ambiguous historical record of the Saharan borderlands of French Algeria after the end of the 1871 revolt. It reveals Ben Driss’ own observations about his political agenda as agha and his application, heretofore neglected, of new scientific knowledge to sanitary and economic challenges in the region, in addition to re-examining the archival record in light of published primary sources on the retired soldier’s reign that have gone unconsidered.