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Show Our Old forts Shall Yhey he 'Preserved ? ,''' ? ' " , . ' ''""to",, i y 4Mm-'- ' . " ' - 5 .-r,. ..... - ,,., ,..-. ,. , .rn - ' r5 - z. " ' . y ort Ahrahant -Lincoln, MP by UT Barry iJSiSS yA.. The Flag Rises Again Over Tort Dearborn xxrx By ELMO SCOTT WATSON mm ""ARLY this summer the secretary ol TJ I war announced that, in the inter-" inter-" Y I ests of economy and because they wmmmJji nnd outlived their usefulness, some fifty army posts were to be dismantled disman-tled and abandoned. Soon afterwards after-wards Mrs. George A. Custer, wid-; wid-; ow of the famous Indian fighter, was quoted in press dispatches from her home in New York as saying: "It does seem as if some of the old frontier forts should be saved. We ought not to allow every vestige of that period to die. We should preserve what history we have." Almost immediately her statement was linked with the fact that Fort Abraham Lincoln near Bismarck, N. D., was one of the army posts marked for dissolution and the suggestion was made that the post from which Custer rode away to his death on the Little Big Horn in Montana in 1S76 should be preserved as a memorial memo-rial to him and his gallant men of the Seventh cavalry. As a matter of fact the present Fort Abraham Lincoln has no connection with the old Indian fighting days. The original Fort Lincoln was built early in the seventies a few miles south of the present city of Mandan, N. D. It was first named Fort McKean but that name was soon changed to the one which honored the memory of our Civil war President. As usual the Sioux Indians resented the building of an army post in their territory which they regarded regard-ed as a violation of the treaty with the government gov-ernment made at Fort Laramie in 1868 and began a series of attacks on the post. As a result of these attacks and further evidences evi-dences that the Sioux were on the point -of an outbreak, Gen. Phil Sheridan, commanding the Military Division of the Missouri, decided that a cavalry regiment which could pursue and punish pun-ish the hostiles when the need arose should be assigned to the Department of Dakota. So the Seventh cavalry, commanded by Custer, was ordered up from New Orleans in April, 1873, and was stationed at Fort Abraham Lincoln. From that fort Gen. George A. Forsyth went on his exploring expedition up the Yellowstone in 1S73 and in the same year Gen. A. H. Terry mobilized at Fort Lincoln and Fort Rice another expedition which was to escort and guard the surveyors who were to make the preliminary survey for the Northern Pacific railroad through the Yellowstone country. Custer's Seventh cavalry cav-alry was a part of this expedition and had its first taste of fighting with the Sioux. In fact, on one occasion the Seventh narrowly escaped the fate which was to overtake it three years later. From this post, also, Custer started in 1S74 on his exploring expedition in the Black Hills which gave to the world the news of the discovery discov-ery of gold in that region, resulted in a mad rush of whites into the Sioux's beloved Pab-sah-pa (Black Hills) and eventually precipitated precipi-tated the Sioux war of 1S76-77. And on the morning morn-ing of May 17, 1876, Custer and his Seventh marched gaily away from Fort Abraham Lincoln Lin-coln to the stirring strains of "The Girl I Left Behind Me" and rode away across the prairie toward the west. The next scene in the story of Fort Lincoln is told in the final paragraphs of Mrs. Custer's book, "Boots and Saddles," Uhus: "On the 5th of July for it took that time for the news to come the sun rose on a beautiful world, but with its earliest beams came the first knell of disaster. A steamer came down the river bearing the wounded from the battle of the Little Big Horn, of Sunday, June 25th. This battle bat-tle wrecked the lives of twenty-six women at Fort Lincoln, and orphaned children of officers and soldiers joined their cry to that of their bereaved mothers. From that time on the life went out of the hearts of the 'women who weep' and God asked them to walk on alone and in the shadow." After the Indian wars were over Fort Abraham Abra-ham Lincoln gradually fell into disuse and by 1902 all of the buildings, shown in the photograph photo-graph above, except two had been torn down. During the World war a large modern post hearing the same name was built on the opposite oppo-site side of the river just below Bismarck. It is this fort for which there is no apparent use that Is to ha dismantled along with others, none of which, uccording to a government official, "has the slightest historical significance." The agitation produced by the War depa'l-ment's depa'l-ment's announcement and the wide publicity given to the case of Fort Abraham Lincoln has served the useful purpose of recalling to Americans Ameri-cans the part played by forts in our history and it has also brought forth the fact that more of them are being preserved in one form or another than is generally realized. In some cases their ruins are being preserved as memorials or are being used as the basis for reconstruction work ; in other cases exact replicas of the original orig-inal fortifications have been built and in still others monuments or great boulders bearing appropriately engraved bronze tablets have been erected on their sites. The list is so long that only a few examples can be given. Perhaps the outstanding example' of reconstruction recon-struction of a historic fort is that of Ticon-deroga Ticon-deroga on the shores of Lake George in New York. The preservation of this place, so rich in its memories of colonial and Revolutionary war history, is due to the patriotic spirit of. an individual, indi-vidual, Stephen H. P. Pell of New York, in whose family the land upon which Ticonderoga stands has been owned for many years. Much has been done to restore Ticonderoga to its original state and the work is still going on. Illinois' contribution to preserving the memory memo-ry of her frontier outposts was the dedication last summer of a replica of Fort Dearborn, which is to be one of the buildings for the Century Cen-tury of Progress exposition in Chicago in 1933. Skyscrapers now stand on the original site of Fort Dearborn so the replica was built along the lake shore on "made land" which is pushing the shore line out into Lake Michigan. The little lit-tle palisaded structure, which offers such a striking contrast to the tall buildings of stone ' and steel which make up Chicago's sky-line, stands not far from the scene of the historic Fort Dearborn massacre of 1S12 when the garrison gar-rison of the fort was attacked and most of them killed by hostile Indians after they had evacuated the fort and started on their fateful retreat to Fort Wayne, Ind. This replica not only recalls the most thrilling thrill-ing incident in the history of America's second largest city but it also preserves the memory of the man whose name it bears, an important figure in the early days of the republic who is little known to most Americans Gen. Henry Dearborn. Born in New Hampshire in 1751, Dearborn studied medicine and became a doctor doc-tor but abandoned his profession at the outbreak out-break of the Revolution to raise a force of volunteers. He fought at Bunker Hill, accompanied accom-panied Arnold on the expedition to Quebec where he was captured. After being exchanged he entered the service again, fought at Monmouth, Mon-mouth, accompanied Sullivan on the expedition against the Iroquois and was present at the surrender sur-render of Oornwallis. After the war he was twice elected to congress and in 1801 Jefferson made him secretary of war, a position which he held for eight years. At the outbreak of the War of 1S12 Colonel Dearborn was again in military service and was commissioned a major general in the American army. He captured York In Upper Canada and Fort George and after the war commanded the military district of New York. Monroe made him minister to Portugal and after two years he resigned and returned home, dying in Massachusetts in 1S29. Out In the West where pioneer history was a more recent affair than it was in the East and Middle West, there are many evidences of a desire to preserve the historic forts and reconstruct recon-struct them while some vestiges of them still remain. In Kansas there is agitation to reconstruct recon-struct Fort Aubrey, one of the pioneer sod forts on the Arkansas river, and make it a public park. Colorado is busy with its plans for the reconstruction of Bent's fort near Lamar, the post whose history is a veritable summary of the historic Santa Fe Trail. The Bent brothers and Ceran St. Train begat, trading on the Upper Arkansas in the early twenties. The famous adobe fort, at first called Fort William, was begun in 1S28 and completed in 1832. The inclosure was 180 feet by 135 feet. The walls were four feet thick and fifteen feet high. Bastions thirty feet high rose from two corners and were provided with loopholes for musketry and cannon. Fort Bent was for twenty years the most important trading post on the frontier and to name all the men who were connected con-nected with it Fremont, Kit Carson, Dick Woo-ton Woo-ton and a host of others is to call the roll of all the outstanding men in the earliest Wild West. What Bent's fort was to the Santa Fe Trail, Fort Laramie was to that other famous transcontinental trans-continental highway, the Oregon Trail. So it is especially appropriate that a movement should now be under way in Wyoming for the purchase pur-chase of old Fort Laramie from its present ewners (it forms part of a cattle ranch)'5 and convert it into a state monument. The last legislature appropriated $15,000 for this purpose pur-pose and Fort Laramie may soon be restored to some of its former glory. The history of Fort Laramie goes back to 1833 when Robert Campbell and William Sub-x Sub-x lette, trappers and fur traders, established a camp on the North Platte river a few miles west of what is now the state line of Wyoming. Here were erected a few cabins and this frontier fron-tier outpost was first named Fort William, then Fort John and finally named Fort Laramie after Jacques La Ramie, a French Canadian trapper whose exploits made him a noted figure in that region. From the beginning the fort did a prosperous business in pelts and furs, trading principally with the Ogalalla bands of the Sioux, the Chey-ennes Chey-ennes and the Arapahoes. In 1S35 it became the property of the Rocky Mountain Fur company, composed of Milton Sublette, Thomas Fitzpat-rick, Fitzpat-rick, Jim Bridger, Henry Fraeb and John Bap-tiste Bap-tiste Gervais. Later In the same year the post passed into the hands of Lucien Fontanelle for the American Ameri-can Fur company, which had been founded several sev-eral years earlier by John Jacob Astor. Business Busi-ness was so good that the American Fur company com-pany felt justified in spending $10,000 on improvements. im-provements. These included enlargements, improved im-proved fortifications and increased facilities far handling furs and trading with emigrants and trappers. The American Fur company sold Fort Laramie Lara-mie to the government In 1849 and for many years under national control it served as a principal prin-cipal depot for emigrants and a base of operations opera-tions against Indians. It was rebuilt and enlarged, en-larged, and sun-dried brick was used in strengthening strength-ening the fortifications. Walls 20 feet high and 4 feet thick were built around it, enclosing a space 250 feet long by 200 feet wide. Within this enclosure there were more than a dozen buildings, chucked squarely against the walls. Fort Laramie played a stirring part in the Indian wars of the sixties and seventies and was finally abandoned as a military reservation in 1S90. It then passed into private hands and has had three different owners. Some of its buildings have been remodeled and put to vari-oas vari-oas uses, but others have crumbled Into the dust of oblivion from which it is now proposed to restore this historic outpost. by Western Newspaper Union.) |
