Built by 1834 by fur traders, Fort Laramie was a focal point of the fUR trade, the Calieornia gold rush, and relations with Native Americans over a half-century, until its closing in 1890. William Sublette and Robert Campbell built Fort William (its original name) at the junction of the Laramie and North Platte Rivers as part of the expansion of the fur trade onto the northern Great Plains. Like bent’s EORT farther to the south, it was designed to become a focal point of contact and exchange between the traders and the surrounding Indians. The stockade was soon called Fort Laramie, after a French trader who had been killed on the Laramie River. The appearance of these fixed posts reflected the declining significance of the rendezvous as an instrument of contact and trade. In 1835, Sublette and associates sold the fort to another fur-trading company headed by Thomas Fitzpatrick, and the next year, the American Fur Company absorbed Fitzpatrick’s group. The fort attracted the trade of the Indians from the Rocky Mountains as well as several groups of Sioux, confirming the significance of its location. The fur business was steady, but trading on the Platte was never as important as that on the upper Missouri or that of the southern Great Plains (Bent’s Fort).
As the fur trade stagnated, the fort assumed another significance. Beginning in 1841, a growing number of settler families began an annual overland trek to Oregon over what became known as the Oregon Trail. For the west-
This painting shows a Native American encampment outside Fort Laramie in Wyoming. (Hulton/Archive)
Ward pioneers, Fort Laramie became the first significant stop after leaving Independence, Missouri. After 800 miles on the overland trail, settlers, guides, and draft animals all used the fort as a site to rest, refit, and organize for the mountain challenges ahead. As the numbers of overland immigrants grew, from 1,000 in 1843 to 5,000 in 1845, the significance of the fort as an oasis on the land trail grew even as the fur trade declined.
In 1849 the U. S. government bought the fort as a military post. The previous year, gold had been discovered in California. The California gold rush stimulated the largest overland immigration in the history of the republic. In 1849, some 80,000 Forty-niners took the overland trail to California, and Fort Laramie became the most important landmark on their way West. Every Forty-niner diary—and there are more than 400 preserved—remarked on the arrival at Fort Laramie and the significance of the place to travelers heading west. Among its other services, the fort (now under the command of an Army officer) kept a register of wagons and a roster of immigrants. National newspapers used these numbers as evidence of the large numbers rushing to California in search of gold.
The large overland immigrations of 1849 and subsequent years were the work of inexperienced argonauts intent on reaching California to find gold. They saw the California Trail, as it came to be called, as an obstacle to their ambitions. Most of them carried too much, and the strain on their draft animals was obvious by the time they reached Fort Laramie. During the stop at the fort, the hurried and harried Forty-niners discarded weight and repacked their wagons. In the middle of the summer, observers commented on the piles of bacon and trunks outside the fort. Indians came not to trade but to pick up the bounty around the fort.
As the focus and number of immigrants to California shifted from overland travel to seagoing transportation in the 1850s, Fort Laramie became a focal point of relations between the U. S. government and the Indian nations of the northern plains. The California gold rush, the annexation of new lands through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and the signing of the Oregon Treaty of 1846 had intensified Euro-American traffic across the plains. The fur trade had begun to decline, and the Indians’ bargaining power was reduced as increasing numbers of non-Indians moved over what they regarded as their hunting areas. In an attempt to settle Indian affairs on the northern plains and to fit Native Americans into new national policies, the federal government convened a large gathering of Indians. The year was 1851, and the site of the meeting was Fort Laramie. Perhaps as many as 10,000 Indians attended a series of meetings.
With the doctrine of the permanent Indian frontier now obsolete, the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1851) laid down federal policy toward the Indians of the plains. Even as nations east of the Mississippi River were moved to the vast area known as Indian Territory on the grounds that such landscape would never be attractive for American settlement, the movement of settlers farther onto the plains indicated that Indian policy must be recast. Under the terms of the Treaty of Fort Laramie, nations of the plains agreed to pursue peaceful relations among themselves and to permit the federal government to construct and maintain roads and other fixed posts within the Indian territories. The treaty also divided the northern plains into specific tracts for individual signatory nations. This division was part of the federal government’s intention to assign specific boundaries to Indian groups, a legal nicety that was probably not clearly understood by the treaty signers. Even if the leaders had understood the various provisions, they lacked power to enforce their will on all members of their tribal groups, which were inherently decentralized. Among those who eventually affixed their marks to the treaty were representatives of the Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow, and Mandan nations. In return for these concessions, the federal government promised that the designated Indian lands would be theirs forever and that the government would protect the Indians from Euro-American trespassers. Finally, the representatives of the government agreed to pay annuities of supplies and provisions worth $50,000 for the next 50 years.
In an arbitrary decision that would become a pattern of relations with the Indians, the Senate reduced length of the annuity to 15 years and increased the amount of goods to $70,000. None of the Indian signatories agreed to these changes, and the peaceful respite was brief. The continuing movement of Euro-American settlers onto the plains, which accelerated after the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), produced the inevitable physical confrontations. The Colorado GOLD rush and the immigration of 50,000 gold seekers across Kansas and Nebraska in the summer of 1859 brought the situation to a head. The large numbers of Colorado Fifty-niners were competitors for the scarce natural resources of the plains, making subsistence for the Plains Indians difficult if not impossible. Conflict between the two groups produced the inevitable number of depredations and reprisals, and within a decade of the great gathering and treaty-making exercise at Fort Laramie, the arrangements for peace had irrevocably broken down.
Fort Laramie remained an important post on the plains for another generation. The enlarged American presence in the form of settlers, the Pony Express, the telegraph, and, finally, the railroad led to escalating clashes. The American government was preoccupied by the Civil War, but with the end of this conflict, expansion onto the plains accelerated. The great Sioux War of 1876 was the most noteworthy example of U. S. and Indian clashes but far from the only one. Meanwhile, Fort Laramie continued to play a central role in affairs on the plains until its closure in 1890.
Further reading: Paul L. Hedren, Fort Laramie in 1876: Chronicle of a Frontier Post at War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988).
World History
