Author: Douglas C. McChristian
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Published: 2017-03-13
Total Pages: 457
ISBN-13: 0806158603
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Of all the U.S. Army posts in the West, none witnessed more history than Fort Laramie, positioned where the northern Great Plains join the Rocky Mountains. From its beginnings as a trading post in 1834 to its abandonment by the army in 1890, it was involved in the buffalo hide trade, overland migrations, Indian wars and treaties, the Utah War, Confederate maneuvering, and the coming of the telegraph and first transcontinental railroad. Douglas C. McChristian has written the first complete history of Fort Laramie, chronicling every critical stage in its existence, including its addition to the National Park System. He draws on an extraordinary array of archival materials–including those at Fort Laramie National Historic Site–to present new data about the fort and new interpretations of historical events. Emphasizing the fort's military history, McChristian documents the army's vital role in ending challenges posed by American Indians to U.S. occupation and settlement of the region, and he expands on the fort's interactions with the many Native peoples of the Central Plains and Rocky Mountains. He provides a particularly lucid description of the infamous Grattan fight of 1854, which initiated a generation of strife between Indians and U.S. soldiers, and he recounts the 1851 Horse Creek and 1868 Fort Laramie treaties. Meticulously researched and gracefully told, this is a long-overdue military history of one of the American West's most venerable historic places.
Author: Alison K. Hoagland
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Published: 2004
Total Pages: 316
ISBN-13: 9780806136202
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →By examining the three exemplary Wyoming forts of Laramie, Bridger, and D. A. Russell, the author explains how widely varying architectural designs, rather than standardized plans, were used to construct western American forts.
Author: LeRoy Reuben Hafen
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Published: 2018-08
Total Pages: 256
ISBN-13: 1496205243
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →To weary travelers on the Oregon Trail during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Fort Laramie was a welcome sight. Its walls and flag-decked towers rose from the high plains, their solidity suggesting that the white man was gaining a toehold in the wilderness. Hafen and Young present the colorful history of Fort Laramie from its establishment as Fort John in 1834 to its abandonment in 1890. Early on, the fort was controlled by the American Fur Company and patronized by trappers like Jim Bridger and Kit Carson. Then it was a vital supply center and rest stop for a tide of emigrants--missionaries, Mormons, forty-niners, and homeseekers. As more wagons rolled west and the Pony Express came through, the need for protection increased; in 1849, Fort Laramie was converted from a trapper's post into a military fort. Down through the years there were skirmishes with the Plains Indians, who sometimes came to the fort to barter and to treat. The peace council of 1851--one of the largest gatherings of tribes ever seen in the Old West--is here described in fascinating detail. The cast of characters in this great historical pageant reads like a who's who of the American West.