Old Forts of the Northwest

By Herbert M. Hart and Paul J. Hartle

Beyond the wide Missouri lay the prairie—“the biggest clearing on the Almighty’s footstool.” And every few hundred miles, holding to the rivers and wooded bottoms, were the outposts of the white civilization—the military forts of the U.S. Army. Father, mother and comforter to the settlers, trading points for the trappers and buffalo hunters, rallying points for the scouts.

Awaiting the reader of this sentimental journey into the days of “Boots and Saddles,” are the graphic stories of battles against Indians and boredom. A military man, author Hart has the feel of these men who did the fighting and their places of conflict and refuge. He recounts the Bloody Bozeman outrage, Red Cloud’s War of 1866-68, and the pre-Civil War fights that seasoned lieutenants for the stars of Union and Confederate generals.

It is a thrilling experience to read of the forts that opened the West for the stages, river boats and wagon trains...of those that protected the white man from the Indians and others that protected Indians from the whites...of those “hog and hominy” forts that gave solace to settlers who waited for the Indian attacks that never came...of the places called “Hog Ranches” that provided soldiers with entertainment lacking at Army posts...and of those forts George Armstrong Custer called home.

With all this there are portraits, in both word and photograph, of the many famous generals who rode this frontier of history: Sherman, Sheridan, Crook, Custer, Harney, Sully, Connor, Mackenzie, Howard, Miles, Terry, Carrington, de Trobriand, Gibbon and Canby.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Borodino Books
• Release date: Dec 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9781789127799

Herbert M. Hart

Herbert Michael Hart (1928-2015) was a former Director of Public Affairs for the United States Marine Corps and one of the country’s leading authorities on historic American forts. Born in Saint Louis, Missouri, on October 19, 1928, the son of Cpt. Herbert M. Hart, USNR, and Helen Quigley, he graduated from Northwestern University’s Naval ROTC in Evanston, Illinois. He was commissioned a second lieutenant upon graduation from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism in 1951 and served in Korea, where he was twice wounded, as well as in the Middle East and in Vietnam. He was often assigned to duties with the Navy for a total of 17 years during his 31 years of active duty. His military awards included two Legions of Merit with combat “V,” the Meritorious Service Medal, five Air Medals, two Purple Hearts, the Army Commendation Medal, the Navy Commendation Medal with combat “V” and the Combat Action Ribbon. Col. Hart was the author of five books: the “Old Forts” series and “Tour Guides to Old Western Forts.” He was an assistant editor of the Leatherneck, Marine magazine and frequent contributor to military publications. He was a co-founder, volunteer executive director and newsletter editor for the Council on America’s Military Past, a military history-historic preservation organization. Col. Hart was married to Teresa Keating (1929-2002), a registered nurse who held a master’s degree in psychiatric nursing from Columbia University, and the couple had seven children: Bridget, Erin, Bret, Tracy, Megan, Michael and Patrick. Col. Hart died of natural causes on August 3, 2015 in Frederick, Maryland, aged 86.

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Text originally published in 1963 under the same title.

© Borodino Books 2018, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

OLD FORTS OF THE NORTHWEST

BY

HERBERT M. HART

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

DEDICATION 4

FOREWORD 5

THE SOMETIMES WAR 7

ABOUT THE PLATS 10

THE HEADQUARTERS FORTS 12

Fort Snelling, Minnesota 13

Fort Vancouver, Washington 17

Fort Omaha, Nebraska 21

Fort Humboldt, California 24

Fort Douglas, Utah 27

Fort Shaw, Montana 33

The Queen (Fort Laramie, Wyoming) 36

Hog Ranch 41

POST-GRADUATE SCHOOL FOR FUTURE GENERALS 44

Fort Lane, Oregon 46

Fort Yamhill, Oregon 50

Fort Steilacoom, Washington 53

Fort Gaston, California 56

THE BLOODY BOZEMAN 61

Forts Connor and Reno, Wyoming 62

Fort Phil Kearney, Wyoming 67

Fort C. F. Smith, Montana 70

GUARDIANS OF THE RIVER 73

Fort Randall, South Dakota 74

Fort Lookout, South Dakota 78

Fort Sully, South Dakota 82

Fort Rice, North Dakota 88

Fort Buford, North Dakota 93

Fort Union, North Dakota 97

Camp Cooke, Montana 99

Fort Benton, Montana 102

GUARDIANS OF THE TRAILS 105

Fort Mitchell, Nebraska 106

Fort Kearny, Nebraska 109

Fort McPherson, Nebraska 112

Camp Collier, South Dakota 117

Fort Sedgwick, Colorado 119

Fort Lupton, Colorado 122

Fort Fetterman, Wyoming 126

Fort Caspar, Wyoming 130

Fort Abercrombie, North Dakota 134

Fort Totten, North Dakota 137

Fort Bridger, Wyoming 141

Camp Ruby, Nevada 145

Fort Halleck, Nevada 148

Fort Boise, Idaho 151

Fort Walla Walla, Washington 155

Fort Dalles, Oregon 158

GUARDIANS OF THE RAILS 161

Fort Ransom, North Dakota 162

Fort Sidney, Nebraska 166

Fort D. A. Russell, Wyoming 173

Fort Sanders, Wyoming 179

Fort Fred Steele, Wyoming 185

THE PEACEKEEPERS 188

Fort Ridgely, Minnesota 189

Fort Sisseton, South Dakota 192

Fort Hartsuff, Nebraska 196

Camp Lyon, Idaho 199

Fort Bidwell, California 203

Fort Harney, Oregon 206

Fort McDermit, Nevada 210

Camp Winfield Scott, Nevada 214

Fort Logan, Montana 219

THE PROTECTORS 227

Fort Simcoe, Washington 228

Camp Lincoln, California 232

Fort Robinson, Nebraska 235

Fort Yates, North Dakota 240

Fort Lapwai, Idaho 243

Fort Washakie, Wyoming 247

A HOME FOR GENERAL CUSTER 251

Fort McKeen, North Dakota 252

Camp Hancock, North Dakota 255

Fort Abraham Lincoln, North Dakota 257

TWILIGHT 262

Camp Sturgis and Fort Meade, South Dakota 263

Fort McKinney, Wyoming 268

Fort Custer, Montana 271

Fort Missoula, Montana 275

Fort Sherman, Idaho 279

Fort Spokane, Washington 282

Fort Maginnis, Montana 286

Fort Assinniboine, Montana 291

Fort Keogh, Montana 294

A DIRECTORY OF MILITARY FORTS OF THE NORTHWEST 1850–1890 299

CALIFORNIA (NORTHERN)—Above 40th Parallel Only. 299

COLORADO (NORTHERN)—Above 40th Parallel Only. 300

IDAHO 300

MINNESOTA 301

MONTANA 302

NEBRASKA 303

NEVADA (NORTHERN) — Above 40th Parallel Only. 304

NORTH DAKOTA 304

OREGON 305

SOUTH DAKOTA 306

UTAH (NORTHERN) — Above 40th Parallel Only. 308

WYOMING 309

BIBLIOGRAPHY 312

UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL PUBLICATIONS AND SOURCES 312

BOOKS AND OTHER SOURCES 313

NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES 319

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 321

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 326

DEDICATION

This is a Triple Dedication:

TO THE WESTERN ARMY OF 1850–1890

who, with their families, called these forts "home;"

TO THE HISTORIANS,

especially those of the National Park Service, who are striving to preserve the story of these forts;

TO THE OTHER HARTS,

Teresa, Bridget (2½), Erin (1½), and Bret (½) who journeyed 11,000 miles to see these forts even if they didn’t know what they were seeing at the time.

FOREWORD

A military necessity for the soldier’s presence at a certain point arose, and orders were issued for a post to be built. A command was marched out, say on to the wide plain far from everyone else, and halted beside a stream. It had been told to ‘build a post,’ and a post was built.—Bvt. Brig.-Gen. George A. Forsyth writing in 1900 of frontier forts.

AND SO a chapter in American history was written. It was a chapter of exploration and exploitation, courage and cowards, progress and pathos.

The chapter has been closed and its true nature all but forgotten, the facts lost behind the romanticized clouds of modern novels, motion pictures, and television. Its memorials remain, scattered throughout the west as the names of cities, hamlets, ghost towns, and mere sites.

These are the places visited in this book via pictures taken during 1962 photography, historical sketches or photographs, and simplified plats. It may be a surprise to see that so little remains of most forts, and this was a factor involved in selecting what forts to visit, and to include here.

In the absence of complete data at the federal and state government level, we had to resort to more than 1,000 inquiries to local, state and federal sources to find out what forts existed, and their present condition.

A combination of remaining evidence, and of historical significance, decided the 70-some forts for this book, and the 120-some to be included in its later companions in the series. The geographical division along the 40th parallel was arbitrary, as was the north-south line along Nebraska and Minnesota.

New Yorkers might consider anything beyond the Hudson as the west, but we felt the true Northwest began at Fort Snelling, and here placed our boundary. We also felt that the true period of western movement under the Army’s guardianship was 1850 to 1890, and those years became our time boundaries.

Every fort covered in this book actually was visited, except for one. That was Fort Washakie, Wyoming, left out by a schedule that was too tightly packed. We did get to the others in 11,000 miles of driving, one tornado, one hail storm, one Dakota rainy season, 16 thunderstorms, a car breakdown, and a toothache (repaired with minimum time lost by our local contact, coincidentally a dentist).

Photographs have not be limited to those of the trip. When prying hands of a 2- or 3-year old exposed forty negatives, state and federal historians had to be called upon for help. Our tight schedule did not provide for all photography to be under optimum conditions, and these same sources came to the rescue when early-or late-day exposures did not prove satisfactory.

We do not pretend that we are providing a definitive history of these forts. Rather, we have tried to tell something of each fort which sets it aside from its contemporaries. A complete history of each post would require far more time and space than possible in this general treatment.

In our research, as described in the Acknowledgements section and hinted at in the Bibliography, we found many contradictions from apparently equally reliable sources. Agreement could not even be found on spellings. Was it Caspar or Casper, McDermit or McDermitt, Lyon or Lyons, Keogh or Keough, Lapwei or Lapwai? In all of these matters, we tried to settle upon the most logical or what appeared to be the most accepted version.

We have tried to give understandable directions to each fort site, though we might not recommend trying to visit some of them. These are routes that worked in 1962, after many unsuccessful shortcuts and blind alleys. Road maps sometimes only generalize the locations of fort sites, placing them on the wrong sides of rivers, mountains, or towns. These routes are the ones we would take if we were going to return to any sites and it is in this spirit that these directions are given.

It should be noted that many sites are privately owned. Visitors should respect the rights of the owners. Souvenir and artifact hunters are urged to remember that what they find and take away from abandoned sites only accelerates the deterioration, depriving others of an historical excursion into the past, and minimizing the success of any possible scientific investigations of the site.

By the time we finished this book, we had encountered close to 300 military fort sites in the Northwest. This book visits more than seventy. These sites remain today as memorials to the Army of the West, but an even greater memorial commemorates this tiny force of soldiers: the thriving home for almost 20 million Americans, the great Northwest.

H. M. H.

Quantico, Virginia

Saint Patrick’s Day, 1963

THE SOMETIMES WAR

AN ARMY of old men and new lieutenants led the Sometimes War that began in 1850. At first, its senior officers had been around since the War of 1812, the rest were fresh from West Point.

Its time span placed the War with Mexico on one end, the Spanish-American War on the other. The Civil War paralleled it for a while in the middle.

It was a fracas fought on a shoe string, sometimes in spite of Congress and public apathy. But it earned twelve campaign streamers for the colors of the United States Army, and settled the Western Frontier.

From 1866 to 1875, it involved more than 200 battles, mostly with the Sioux Indians. Totally, from 1790 to 1898, the subjugation of the American Indian involved 69 campaigns and 19 reasonably definite wars.

The discovery of gold in California brought the Forty-niners. This was the final breaking point for the Indians who had watched trappers, traders, and farmers slowly encroach on their hunting grounds.

In the Pacific Northwest, the Indians refused to settle on reservations. General Harney then opened the area to settlers. In the Plains of the Northwest, a raw lieutenant named Grattan and a drunken interpreter tried to convince the Sioux they should not kill a stray cow. The Grattan force of 30 was killed, and the Sioux took the warpath.

Depending upon semantics involved, wars or expeditions were fielded against the hostile red men, and a semblance of peace returned. Relatively junior officers with names like Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Crook, Pickett, McClellan, Ord, Stuart, Auger, obtained experience that led to generals’ stars in the Civil War.

A tiny, 12,000 man Army fought the first stage of conflict, 1850–62. When rebellion drained the Army of its southern officers and men, and pulled many regular troops to the Eastern fronts, militia volunteers tried to keep the peace.

A massacre in Minnesota, uprisings in Oregon and California, an expedition in Wyoming, the constant threat of secession, and ambushes of the stage lines kept the volunteers busy, though unrecognized.

Even the Confederacy tried to help settle the Indian problem. Its treaty council on the Washita drew 20,000 red men, but the Lee’s surrender left the commissioners without authority and the deliberations were less than academic.

With peace in the East, the vast Army of the Civil War was reduced to almost nothing. It was authorized sixty regiments, but each to consist of ten rather than 24 companies, and each company of 64 men. The private’s pay was cut to $15 a month, less than 1840. Of the 54,000 men authorized, this low pay had attracted only 38,000 by October 1, 1866. And of this number, only 5,000 could be spared for the western frontier.

The area of operations was as large as Europe and numbered more than 300,000 Indians who felt they had first call upon that area. Treaties were tried, only to go up in the smoke of the Bozeman Trail forts. In 1869, President Grant refused to recognize that the Indian tribes had a treaty-making capability, and their status as independent nations ended.

The Indian fighters launched winter campaigns and spring campaigns and summer campaigns. The peacemakers trying to end the Modoc War of Northern California were massacred in 1872. Custer’s 1873 Black Hills Expedition discovered gold in the Sioux hunting grounds. The pot was bubbling and in 1876 it spilled over. Campaigns along the Powder River and the Rosebud lead to the high water mark of the Indian Nations: the Battle of the Little Big Horn on July 25, 1876.

This disaster jolted Congress and the public out of its apathy. Everything after this was anti-climactic. The Indians straggled into forts throughout the northwest, and within a year almost all had surrendered. The Nez Perce and Bannocks of Idaho took to the warpath, the former to lead the Army on a masterful 2,000 mile chase before they, too, surrendered. In 1890, the last faint hope of the hostile red man died at the Battle, or Massacre, of Wounded Knee. The surrender of the Brule Sioux on January 30, 1891, closed this chapter in the advancing of the frontier.

This was a saga in which the principal role was played by an undermanned and underpaid Army. It was down to 25,000 men in 1874. Three years later Congress forgot to pay its officers and the War Department had to float loans at banking houses.

But it was an Army that brought peace, and more than peace, to the West. Soldiers at Fort Atkinson, Nebraska, in 1819, spent so much time farming that the Army Inspector suggested they didn’t know how to fight. They proved agriculture could succeed, though, and doubting settlers doubted no longer.

Sawmills were brought by the Army to build its forts, and the lumber industry of the northwest was born. Cattle were driven west to feed the Army, and the great cattle industry was born. Chaplains and schoolteachers were stationed at the forts and ministered to the needs of both military and townspeople, and religion and education helped settle the rawness of the new territory.

Army families were