Fort Laramie

For half a century, nearly every wagon bound for Oregon, California, or Utah passed through Fort Laramie. Founded as a fur-trading post and later garrisoned by the U.S. Army, it sat at the crossroads of the great overland trails and the homelands of the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho. It hosted the largest gathering of Plains nations in history in 1851 and the treaty of 1868 that briefly promised the Black Hills to the Lakota — a promise the government would break within a decade, making Fort Laramie a hinge point in the story of the American West.

Fur traders built Fort William near the confluence of the Laramie and North Platte rivers in 1834, and a successor adobe post, Fort John, followed in 1841. The U.S. Army purchased the post in 1849, renaming it Fort Laramie, to protect the flood of emigrants now moving west along the Oregon, California, Mormon, and later Bozeman trails — an estimated half a million travelers passed within sight of its walls.

In 1851 the fort hosted the Horse Creek Treaty council, drawing an estimated 10,000 Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and other Plains people in the largest gathering of Native nations recorded on the Plains, intended to guarantee safe passage for emigrants and define tribal territories. As conflict over land and resources escalated, the fort became a staging ground for the Army during Red Cloud's War, ending with the Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1868, which recognized the Black Hills as part of the Great Sioux Reservation.

That guarantee collapsed after gold was discovered in the Black Hills in 1874, leading to war and the seizure of the land in violation of the treaty — a grievance still litigated today. The Army abandoned Fort Laramie in 1890 as the frontier it once guarded closed, and its buildings passed into private and state hands before the National Park Service established Fort Laramie National Historic Site in 1938, restoring many of its 19th-century structures.