For this month’s article, I selected a nice note from my collection that I acquired many years ago and thought its location would be an interesting and historical sojourn. So, this month, let’s travel to the Eastern Kansas prairie, and look at historic Fort Scott, Kan.
Fort Scott, Kan., currently the seat of Bourbon County, and a small city of around 7,500 residents, was, as expected, founded as a frontier military post. In 1842, the Department of the Army decided to erect a fort at what is now Fort Scott to delineate the border between white settlement and Native American lands, and to protect white settlers from attacks from Osage Indian tribes, which had become more frequent. After haggling with Cherokee Indians who owned the site, a deal was reached, and first soldiers began to arrive at what would become Fort
