Fort Laramie

Founded in 1834 on the high plains of present-day eastern Wyoming. Fort Laramie evolved into an organizational hub and chief supply center for the U.S. Army in its campaigns against the Sioux and Cheyenne Indians. Fort Laramie and the Great Sioux War focuses on a crucial year in the history of the fort, 1876. That was the year of General George Crook’s Big Horn; the Black Hills gold rush; and chaos at the Red Cloud and Spotted Tail Indian agencies. Paul Hedren draws upon official army records, diaries, and journals to illuminate a fort-based history of the Great Sioux War, and for this edition he also provides a new preface.

For Laramie was one of the most important frontier outposts of the American West. Founded as the trading post Fort William in 1834, the fort became a U.S. military post in 1849. Beginning in 1841, emigrants stopped at Fort Laramie while traveling the Oregon, California, and Mormon Trails. Fort Laramie served as gathering place for thousands of Native Americans and hosted the 1851 and 1868 treaty councils. When the treaties failed, the post became the staging area for campaigns that eventually led to the tribes's confinement on reservations. Fort Laramie was abandoned by the military in 1890; the buildings were auctioned and served private interests during the homestead period from 1890 to 1937. Fort Laramie was acquired by the state of Wyoming in 1937, and the fort became a unit of the National Park System in 1938. Fort Laramie National Historic Site is open daily except New Year's Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. The restoration of many structures to their historical appearance provides visitors with a glimpse of the past. Starley Talbott is a Wyoming native, freelance writer, and former newspaper reporter. This is her second book in the Images of America series. Photographs in this book are from the Fort Laramie National Historic Site, state and national archives, and the author. The Images of America series celebrates the history of neighborhoods, towns, and cities across the country. Using archival photographs, each title presents the distinctive stories from the past that shape the character of the community today. Arcadia is proud to play a part in the preservation of local heritage, making history available to all.

To weary travelers on the Oregon Trail during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Fort Laramie was a welcome sight. Its walls and flag-decked towers rose from the high plains, their solidity suggesting that the white man was gaining a toehold in the wilderness. Hafen and Young present the colorful history of Fort Laramie from its establishment as Fort John in 1834 to its abandonment in 1890. Early on, the fort was controlled by the American Fur Company and patronized by trappers like Jim Bridger and Kit Carson. Then it was a vital supply center and rest stop for a tide of emigrants--missionaries, Mormons, forty-niners, and homeseekers. As more wagons rolled west and the Pony Express came through, the need for protection increased; in 1849, Fort Laramie was converted from a trapper's post into a military fort. Down through the years there were skirmishes with the Plains Indians, who sometimes came to the fort to barter and to treat. The peace council of 1851--one of the largest gatherings of tribes ever seen in the Old West--is here described in fascinating detail. The cast of characters in this great historical pageant reads like a who's who of the American West.

The varied and colorful career of Charles Wesley Allen (1851-1942) took him throughout the northern Plains during an exceptionally turbulent era in its history. He was at the Red Cloud Agency when Red Cloud attempted to prevent the raising of the American flag and the Lakota nearly took over the agency. Allen also visited Deadwood at the height of the Black Hills gold rush, helped build the first government agency on the Pine Ridge reservation, and reported on the Lakota Ghost Dance. Allen happened to be walking through the Indian camp at Wounded Knee when shots rang out on December 29, 1890, and his is arguably the best of all the eyewitness accounts of that tragedy. ø This is Allen's previously unpublished vivid account of the years he described as "the most exciting chapter of my life." As much the chronicle of the passing of an era as a personal narrative, its simple, direct, and often moving prose captures the injustices, gritty details, and relentless energy of a period of dramatic change in the West.

Of all the U.S. Army posts in the West, none witnessed more history than Fort Laramie, positioned where the northern Great Plains join the Rocky Mountains. From its beginnings as a trading post in 1834 to its abandonment by the army in 1890, it was involved in the buffalo hide trade, overland migrations, Indian wars and treaties, the Utah War, Confederate maneuvering, and the coming of the telegraph and first transcontinental railroad. Douglas C. McChristian has written the first complete history of Fort Laramie, chronicling every critical stage in its existence, including its addition to the National Park System. He draws on an extraordinary array of archival materials–including those at Fort Laramie National Historic Site–to present new data about the fort and new interpretations of historical events. Emphasizing the fort's military history, McChristian documents the army's vital role in ending challenges posed by American Indians to U.S. occupation and settlement of the region, and he expands on the fort's interactions with the many Native peoples of the Central Plains and Rocky Mountains. He provides a particularly lucid description of the infamous Grattan fight of 1854, which initiated a generation of strife between Indians and U.S. soldiers, and he recounts the 1851 Horse Creek and 1868 Fort Laramie treaties. Meticulously researched and gracefully told, this is a long-overdue military history of one of the American West's most venerable historic places.

Describes and illustrates the history of Fort Laramie between 1834 and 1890 and its importance as a trade center and military post. Also contains a concise bibliographic essay.