Military Trails

The first forays of the United States military into the West began early in the century with Zebulon Pike and Stephen Long. Their mission was to explore the new possessions acquired by the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. These small expeditions came and departed, having drawn maps and collected data. Beginning in 1842 with early settlers bound for Oregon, Mormons going to Utah in 1847, and the gold seekers heading to California in 1849, the swelling numbers of “invaders” from the East increasingly alarmed the native population. Attacks on travelers occurred with more frequency and by the 1850s, required an organized military campaign, focusing on protection of the wagon trains and stages. Small forts were positioned along the major trails westward, the Santa Fe through Kansas, the Bozeman Trail in Wyoming and Montana, and the Oregon Trail in Nebraska and Wyoming. Relations between the soldiers and the Plains Indians degenerated from the earlier relative harmony, intermingling, and trading to pitched battles and, eventually, slaughter on both sides—exemplified by the massacre at Sand Creek and the Battle of the Little Big Horn.

The most dramatic and violent time for the military stationed along the various trails occurred immediately after the Civil War. The slaughter of mostly women, children and elderly Cheyenne and Arapaho at Sand Creek in November 1864 by Colorado militia under Colonel John Chivington sparked years of revenge attacks. This event and others, plus the tribal resistance to the growing wave of settlers, miners, railroad construction crews and veterans from the War, made the late 1860s a bloody time on the Great Plains.

After 1865 the U. S. Army moved its regular soldiers back into the posts, depleted during the Civil War, to protect the overland trail system and the crews building the various railroads. Providing escorts for stagecoaches to keep the mail running, wagon trains, freighters, and other traffic on the main trails was expensive and costly in men and horses. The War Department plan called for military posts every twenty-five miles with a hundred men. Recently emancipated slaves joined the Army and were sent west to guard settlers on the trails, stagecoaches, railroad workers, and new settlements from the increasing Indian attacks. Here a contingent of African–Americans, known as Buffalo Soldiers, guard a U.S. Overland stage as it leaves Hays City, Kansas.

One of earliest western posts was Ft. Laramie, established in 1845 when Congress authorized military protection along the Oregon Trail. The post was the only civilized stop for emigrants in the eight hundred miles between Fort Kearny, Nebraska, and Fort Bridger, Wyoming. In addition to the Oregon and California Trails, the Mormon Trail, the Bozeman Trail, Pony Express route, the transcontinental telegraph route, and the Deadwood and Cheyenne Stage route passed through Ft. Laramie. It also served as headquarters for military campaigns on the northern plains. Indian councils that attempted to bring peace occurred there in 1851 and 1866-68. An 1864 hand-drawn map of Ft. Laramie by Caspar Collins, the son of the commanding officer, shows the layout of some buildings.

Perhaps the most famous military trail was the Bozeman, established in 1863 as a wagon route—which meant easy grades, good grass, and water about every twenty miles. This was in the middle of the Civil War, but the discovery of gold in Virginia City, Montana, the richest strike since California, gave impetus to the construction of the Trail. Two mountain men, John Jacobs and John Bozeman, promoted a route that would connect the Oregon Trail to the new diggings in western Montana. The road left the established Oregon Trail near Douglas, Wyoming, went northwest along the Bighorn and Wind River Mountains, turning due west near present-day Sheridan, across the high plateau country into the Yellowstone valley of Montana. This was a five hundred mile journey, with good water, but it cut through the heart of the last big hunting ground for the northern Plains Indians. The Lakota Sioux considered this Powder River region to be their traditional hunting grounds. The first wagon train, in July 1863, was stopped by 150 Cheyenne and Lakota, whose leader, Red Cloud, warned, “You can’t go on in the direction you are going, you are going into our country, where we hunt. We won’t let our women and children starve…we will keep this land…If you turn back, we will not hurt you” (1). Despite this clear message, nearly a thousand wagons traveled the trail in 1864.

In 1865 the government negotiated a treaty with Red Cloud to close the Bozeman, at the same time sending troops to build Forts Reno, Phil Kearny, and C. F. Smith to reinforce the Trail. Red Cloud was furious at the duplicity. The Lakota stepped up their attacks. Paymaster Robert Clarke described an encounter in 1868 "Just as we are ready to pack the wagons, and move from [Fort] Reno, we have an alarm of Indians….The Indians, mounted, seem to come over every bluff, and from every ravine. They are pursued by the cavalry, without much regard to order, to the bluff. There it is found that they are numerous, and the cavalry retreat before them. I counted 40 Indians on horses, and the number was probably twice as many. The cavalry again made a stand some half a mile from the post, and the Indians by degrees again retire. Peach, one of our best men, is killed. His body is afterwards recovered…. The head scalped and cut off, and arrows sticking in him. Another man is shot with an arrow through the flesh of the shoulder, and rides to the post with it sticking in him." (2)

On December 21, 1866, Lt. Colonel W. J. Fetterman and his detachment were wiped out three miles from Ft. Phil Kearny. Ordered to rescue a besieged woodcutting crew, Lt. Col. William J. Fetterman and eighty men were decoyed over a ridge by a small number of Indians led by the young Lakota warrior, Crazy Horse. Beyond the ridge Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho, over one thousand warriors, waited in hiding. Fetterman's pursuit into the trap, in violation of his commanding officer’s orders, led to the death of the entire command.

In Nebraska and Wyoming, with the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad, the troops had orders to protect the main transcontinental lines of transportation and communication. The military strategy was to keep Lakota and Cheyenne away from the new rail lines in southern Wyoming by distracting them with patrols from the Bozeman forts in the north.

When the Union Pacific Railroad reached a point farther west and the Indian danger decreased, the dangerous Bozeman and its forts were no longer needed; the forts were abandoned after the Fort Laramie Treaty was signed with the Northern Plains tribes in 1868. In July 1874 the treaty was violated, when Lieutenant Colonel George Custer, with orders to investigate the Black Hills in Wyoming and South Dakota, trespassed through the territory that had been granted to the Indians in 1868.

As the Indian danger grew less acute, the smaller forts along all of the trails were abandoned. In the 1880s the Army consolidated its troops into larger, more permanent establishments near urban areas such as Denver, Omaha, and Leavenworth, Kansas. In the 1890s and into the first decades of the 1900s, some of these forts (including Ft. Logan in Denver) had a balloon corps. Here is a photo of the balloon barn and a balloon at Ft. Omaha, sometime around 1900.

A few of these larger military establishments are still active today. Ft. Logan, south of Denver, was used as an army post until the early 1960s; in 1974 it became a state mental health facility. Ft. Omaha was occupied by the military from 1868 until 1974. Ft. Robinson in Nebraska began in 1874 as the Red Cloud Agency. It was home to buffalo soldiers early in the twentieth century, the last cavalry remount station in the 1930s, the K-9 Corps, and German POWs in World War II. Fort Riley, Kansas, was built in 1853 to protect travelers on the Santa Fe Trail. In 1866 it became the site of the formation of the 7th Cavalry Regiment lead by Lt. Col. George Custer. In 1892 the fort became important in the U.S. Army's educational system. Its schools became the center of cavalry tactics and training. Today the Army's 1st Infantry Division, the 1st Armored Division, is located at Fort Riley.

1. McCraig, Donald. (October 2000) ”The Bozemn Trail,” Smithsonian, 92.

Clarke, Robert. (1868) Diary of Col. Robert D. Clarke. Retrieved from: University of Wyoming