National Parks Traveler

Fort Laramie was a sprawling post in 1870. The Laramie River cuts between the wooden and stone buildings in the background and the tents in the foreground/NPS Archives

Fort Laramie, An Overlooked Trove Of American History

By Kurt Repanshek

When the U.S. Army in 1849 bought a fur trading post near the confluence of the Laramie and North Platte rivers on the windswept plains of the Wyoming Territory, it wasn't exactly a turnkey operation.

"My glowing fancy vanished before the wretched reality, a miserable, cracked, dilapidated enclosure. . . some of it propped with beams of timber which an enemy had only to kick away and down would come the whole structure," William Kelly, an emigrant heading west for the Oregon Territory, noted in his diary. 

By the mid-1850s, things were not much better. In his book, Fort Laramie, Military Bastion of the High Plains, the late Douglas C. McChristian described Fort Laramie as “a bizarre combination of architecture, including a walled fort with bastions, a southern plantation-style house, southwest adobes…simple frame cottages, and stone buildings.”

Among those structures was "Old Bedlam," a two-story building built in 1849 that initially housed young officers and later saw the fort commander and his wife live on the second floor. Today it claims fame as Wyoming's oldest documented building.

Alfred Jacob Miller produced this pre-1840 painting of Fort William/Public domain

What the Army purchased was a trading post thrown together with cottonwood logs in June 1834 when William Sublette and Robert Campbell saw the future, one they knew didn't involve the annual mountain man rendezvous in the wilderness where trappers and Native Americans would gather raucously to trade furs for goods, swap wild stories and, perhaps most importantly, carouse. It made much more sense, the two figured, to establish a centrally located trading post, one closer to the Great Plains crowded with bison, not the mountain streams where beaver were almost trapped out.

May 31, 1834 -- This day we laid the foundation log of a fort, on Laramee’s fork. A friendly dispute arose between our leader and myself, as to the name. He proposed to call it Fort Anderson, I insisted upon baptising it Fort Sublette, and holding the trump card in my hand, (a bottle of champagne) was about to claim the trick. Sublette stood by, cup reversed, still objecting, when Patton offered a compromise which was accepted, and the foam flew, in honor of Fort William which contained the triad prenames of clerk, leader and friend.” -- William Marshall Anderson

Standing on a small rise above the Laramie River on a mild spring day earlier this year, I closed my eyes in the late morning sun and tried to envision Sublette's arrival at this very location nearly 200 years ago with hopes of profiting from the fur trade. He no doubt appreciated that the Laramie and nearby North Platte provided good water, the open landscape ensured no one could sneak up, and the surrounding prairie was crowded with bison as far as one could see.

The fort's interior as Miller interpreted it/Public domain

But Sublette and Campbell and their flung-together trading post are only part of the history that soaked into the grounds protected today by Fort Laramie National Historic Site, an oft-overlooked destination for park travelers; visitation during 2020 reached only 26,066 due to Covid, and in 2019 the annual tally was only 42,892. With its rich history, the historic site should attract many more, if only they knew of that historic background.

Robust Western History

“It’s going to be part of national expansion," said Stanford University historian Richard White of the fort's prominence, "but before that the original forts were erected there because they’re so closely connected to Indian migrations and encampments. They’re fur trade posts, which largely followed Indian movements. And after that with the Oregon Trail it’s clearly very closely connected with American expansion.”

Professor White, who long has focused on the American West and Native American history, agreed that Sublette and Campbell were somewhat prescient in their decision to raise their trading post by the two rivers.

"There’s a huge change in the economy of the Great Plains, because bison had always been important to native peoples, but the bison trade is difficult because bison robes are really heavy," he said during a phone conversation. "So what they’re (Sublette and Campbell) doing is they’re being able to tap into Indian women’s labor by and large and find ways to profitably get them to the East."

Jim Beckwourth was born into slavery, later became a mountain man, and served at Fort Laramie as a scout for the military/Public domain

The fort, first called William and then John before the Army changed it to Laramie and plastered over the walls with adobe, became a magnet for fur traders, Native Americans, emigrants, and, of course, the military. 

Sioux, Pawnee, Arikara, and other Plains tribes (both North and South) came through to negotiate treaties with the "Long Knives," and tens of thousands of emigrants stopped here for a short reprieve from eating trail dust on their way towards what they hoped would be a better life on the West Coast in Oregon or California. The U.S. Cavalry, conscious of the need to protect those emigrants, quickly turned Fort Laramie into the largest military outpost on the Western frontier.

"I think I was in fourth grade the first time I visited the fort," Phil Roberts, an emeritus history professor at the University of Wyoming, told me. "We’re from Lusk (Wyoming), and I’ve always considered it, even throughout my years of teaching, I’ve always considered it the major site along the Oregon Trail, California, Oregon, Mormon trails because it was so critical for a number of reasons. Supplying the travelers, providing them with a sense of federal protection. And I think it’s a little bit strange to say, but it was a rather psychological marker for the trail. They were just about to encounter the biggest hardships, the longest hardships of the trail ahead. They were right on the edge of Rockies and on the way in."

The National Park Service realized the jewel it was getting in 1938 when the cash-strapped state of Wyoming offered the agency the keys free of charge.

"No historic site in the Rocky Mountain region is more important than that of Fort Laramie," the Park Service noted in 1942 in its guide to the fort. "Its story as a fur-trading station and as a military outpost epitomizes the history of the successive stages by which the immense territory reaching from the Missouri River to the Pacific coast was opened to settlement and occupied by adventurous and freedom-loving American and European pioneers seeking to build new and better homes for themselves and their children on the virgin land of the West."

Old Bedlam was in deplorable shape when the National Park Service received Fort Laramie from the state of Wyoming/Archives

Emigrants En Masse

When the fort came into the Park Service's care, the architectural pack rat's collection of barracks, Captain's Quarters, and jail that once was a portal for U.S. expansion were in various stages of collapse. Today fewer than two dozen structures remain from a setting that in the mid-19th century appeared as a bustling town, with perhaps 1,000 permanent residents bolstered by thousands of emigrants seeking a brief reprieve from the hardships of their journeys west on the Oregon and California trails.

Brigham Young and his Mormon followers pulling their handcarts stopped here in 1847, and upwards of 30,000 would-be prospectors on their way to California in 1849 passed through, as well. In 1850 and again in 1852 its been estimated that 50,000 migrants passed Fort Laramie en route to Oregon and California.

Even though Fort Laramie was the only outpost along the 750 miles between Fort Kearney in the Nebraska Territory and Salt Lake City in the Utah Territory, the numbers that stopped at the fort are boggling. If you're searching for the door that opened Westward Expansion, find yourself at Fort Laramie. It's decidedly a side trip from anywhere, as it's about 100 miles north of Cheyenne, Wyoming, and maybe 55 miles west of Scottsbluff, Nebraska. From Interstate 25, the nearest major highway, the drive is not quite 30 miles and 40 minutes from Wheatland, Wyoming.

Walking the grounds, with Northern flickers calling out for mates in the distance and the occasional bugle call from the visitor center echoing across the landscape, I tried to envision the ruins before me as standing facilities, milling with emigrants, traders, military personnel, and native peoples. If I could travel back in time I surely would have heard the clang of the blacksmith's hammer on anvil, acquired a coating of fine dust from the dirt grounds, and heard a rich mixture of dialects and languages.

The history to find across the historic site's grounds, in its restored buildings, and in the surrounding countryside, is deeper than first glance might indicate. It's not just a military relic. Fort Laramie truly was an iconic milepost in the nation's history

"Anybody traveling on the Plains in those years, it’s the most formidable structure out there," Professor White pointed out. "You have to go into the Southwest to find equivalent kinds of settlements. You had adobe walls, you had a place that looks quite remarkable, of course they’re going to take it. And, of course, it’s at a crossroads. The thing about Fort Laramie is that it’s at the crossroads of the Great Plains. All kinds of things intersect there. So yeah, it’s a logical place for the Army to set itself up.”

Emigrants found more than just a place to spend a few nights to catch their breath before pushing on across Wyoming and into the Rocky Mountains.

“Even more than that, it becomes a mercantile center. What people forget about it is all kinds of people will congregate (there)," the professor went on. "There are traders coming up from the Southwest, there are others coming in from the West, to meet the migrants there, to sell them supplies. The advantage of Fort Laramie is it’s one of the first places where they’ve realized what they’ve gotten themselves in for. That they really have brought too much stuff and they don’t necessarily have sufficient supplies to make it all the way to California.

“So, what you’re going to have is New Mexican merchants who are going to be driving up there with sheep and cattle and things to sell them, sell them food at the same time to trade for a lot of the items that they have which if (the emigrants) don’t sell them there, they’re probably going to abandon them and they’re going to be scooped up later on along the trail," he said. “So what you have is this huge mercantile exchange. There are restaurants at Fort Laramie. People think you’re out in the middle of the wilderness but when you stumble into Fort Laramie — you’re not stumbling, you’re still in pretty good shape — you’re really coming into a great commercial marketplace.”

That was exactly what Alonzo Delano encountered on June 12, 1849, when he reached Fort Laramie.

"Around the fort were many wagons . . . sold or abandoned by emigrants. A strong, heavy wagon could be bought for from five to fifteen dollars," he wrote. "In ordinary seasons, the company were (sic) able to keep some small supplies for emigrants, but such was the rush now, that scarcely anything could be obtained, even at the most exorbitant prices."

Native Americans gathered on the plains surrounding the fort, in part because of the trade they could conduct. But the military also gathered tribes to negotiate treaties, in 1851 and 1868. That latter pact remains contested today in large part because of the Native Americans' loss of the Black Hills to the United States despite the treaty's assurance they would retain that region. 

Today Old Bedlam has been restored to its glory/Kurt Repanshek

All these cultures -- Native Americans, white traders, a cavalry comprised of soldiers with Irish and German names, and even African-Americans, first enslaved and then free and then Buffalo soldiers -- created a rich cultural soup of the frontier.

"It’s a wonderful sample of diversity in the West," said Professor White. "People think, well it’s going to be American soldiers, it’s usually going to be Anglo-Americans. Well, they’re not Anglo-Americans, they’re not just Native Americans. They’re going to be all kinds of people coming up from the Southwest. You’re going to have people who have mixed race, you’re going to have numerous groups of Indians. It’s really a polyglot place.”

The vision of Fort Laramie being a predominantly white establishment can be blamed on the Westerns directed by John Ford and others decades ago.

"There’s a popular view of the West, which is really an invention of the 1940s, '50s, '60s, where all the wagon trains are all whites, the Indians run with the enemies," the professor said.

"And Fort Laramie goes against that entire history.”

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Traveler postscript: For additional insights into Fort Laramie and how the National Park Service has struggled to interpret its complex, multi-faceted history, read the late Richard West Sellar's two-part series, War And Consequences: The American Indian Movement Vs. The National Park Service At Fort Laramie, found here and here.

To prepare for your visit, consider reading Fort Laramie, Military Bastion of the High Plains by Douglas C. McChristian, and/or Fort Laramie and the Sioux by Remi Nadeau. Both offer equally good narratives of the early days of Fort Laramie.

Finally, download Traveler's two podcasts on Fort Laramie, found here and here to get a feel for what you'll encounter during your visit.