Wyoming's Frontier Military

Buffalo, Wyoming, located on the famous Bozeman Trail, is within some 50 km. of three military forts related to travel on that nineteenth century pathway to the newly discovered gold claims in Montana. In 1863, a John M. Bozeman and his friend, John Jacobs, mapped a trail northward from along the North Platte River in southeastern Wyoming, where it left the East-West Oregon Trail, to the gold fields in southwestern Montaana. It saved some 350 miles over previous routes in use. Unfortunately, however, it also went through the middle of the last and best hunting grounds of the Native American High Plains tribes in the region, principally the Sioux, Arapaho, and Cheyenne.

The subsequent miner and immigrant traffic on the Trail led to armed conflicts with eventual establishment of military forts (1865-1868) to protect the white travelers. Those forts were Cantonment/Fort Reno and Fort Phil Kearny in Wyoming with additional Forts C.F. Smith and Ellis located in Montana. The Indian pressure was so vigorous and so unrelenting on these outposts that, in 1868, the U. S. government abandoned them and ceded the land back to the Native Americans.

Because of the proximity of Forts Reno and Phil Kearny to Buffalo as well as a third and later (1877) Fort McKinney, 5 km. due west of Buffalo, the Gatchell Museum has one or more exhibits devoted to each of them.

Fort Reno

Originally established by Brigadier General P. E. Connor as a supply depot or "cantonment" for his Powder River Expedition in 1865 against the northern Plains tribes. That Expedition was to be a punitive action against the Indians for their harassment of emigrants along the Oregon and Overland Trails. It resulted in only one significant battle - the destruction of an Arapaho village near present day Ranchester, Wyoming - and permanent alienation of that tribe against the white man.

In 1866 the U.S. War Department sent a military force, under the command of Colonel Henry B. Carrington, to build forts in Wyoming and Montana along the newly used Bozeman Trail. Carrington strengthened the existing Fort Reno and built Fort Phil Kearny on Piney Creek in Wyoming and Fort C.F. Smith in Montana.

Fort Phil Kearny

Carrington and his men were to build the forts and then to defend them and the miners and immigrants on their way to Montana from the resident hostiles. He scarcely had enough men and supplies to do the former, making the latter task virtually impossible. This state of affairs was apparently due in major part to a severe lack of reliable data on the northern Plains tribes by the federal government. The soldiers, in turn, were a mixture of recruits and veterans, many from the recently ended Civil war in the East.

The Indians did not attack the fort directly but rather continually raided the herds of horses and woodcutting parties that had to range beyond the protection of the fort's howitzers. Red Cloud, Crazy Horse and the other war chiefs soon learned that they could also decoy the cavalry units - sent to rescue the herders and wood-cutters from their Indian attackers - out of sight of the fort and range of its howitzers. On December 21, 1866, Captain William Fetterman and his force of 80 men were decoyed into an ambush of some 2,000 Indians, mostly Sioux and Cheyenne, and completely annihilated. This disaster and the continual battles came to be termed "Red Cloud's War." They led to the replacement of Carrington as post commander and to the eventual abandonment of all the Bozeman Trail forts by the federal government in 1868. The land was again returned to the Native Americans. They had "won" but the future was to give them only about a decade longer to continue their "Buffalo Culture" on the High Plains east of the Rocky Mountains.

Fort McKinney

This fort was built near the site of the old "Fort Reno" to support Brigadier General George Crook's Sioux War of 1876-1878. It was then moved in 1878 to a new location just a few miles west of Buffalo at the base of the Bighorn Mountains. The Fort served as an important military outpost guarding communication lines through the area as well as protecting the local settlers and ranchers from roving bands of off-reservation Indians. Troops from the Fort were involved in the 1887 Crow "Sword Bearer" incident, the 1890 Ghost Dance affair and the Battle of Wounded Knee and the arrest of cattlemen at the TA ranch some 13 miles south of Buffalo during the 1892 Johnson County Invasion.

In 1903 the State of Wyoming gained control of the facilities at the Fort and converted it into a Veteran's Home that continues in operation to the present day.