One branch, the Mountain Branch, of the Santa Fe Trail, led up the Arkansas, to it, and on, to turn south across the Raton Mountain for Santa Fe. The Cheyennes gathered near-by, every fall, for their great winter camp. The Utes from the Rocky Mountains, one hundred and thirty miles west, sometimes came down. A traders' and trappers' trail between Santa Fe and the Platte River passed this way. It was a sort of a cross-roads, in the wilderness.
Bent's Fort, called also Fort William after William Bent, was built of adobe or clay bricks. It was one hundred and fifty feet long and one hundred feet wide. Its walls were eighteen feet high, and six or seven feet thick at the base. The tops formed a parapet or walk. In two diagonally opposite corners were bastions of round towers, thirty feet high, swelling out so as to command the walls. The main gateway was thirty feet wide and closed by a pair of huge plank doors. Over the gateway there was a sentry box, floating the United States flag. The six-pounder brass cannon of the caravan was mounted upon a wall, on a swivel, to fire in all directions; other cannon were added.
Bent's Fort became famous. Soon all the Indians for leagues around knew of it. The Arapahos and the Southern Cheyennes traded in their buffalo robes here; the mountain Utes, and the Red River Comanches of northern Texas came in. At one time, in the late fall and in the winter, twenty thousand Indians would be camped within sight of it.
Trappers from north, west and south made it their market and headquarters. Traders trailed in, from the States and from New Mexico. In 1846 General Stephen Watts Kearny's army from Leavenworth for Santa Fe and California halted here, to refit.
So Bent's Fort prospered. It had the only ice-house on the plains; the pumpkin pies of its negress cook, Charlotte, spread its fame wider; the rank and file of the Indians and the trappers and traders, and the army officers themselves, swore by Bent's Fort.
The Indians called William Bent "Hook-Nose Man" or "Roman Nose." He married a Cheyenne girl. He was the governor of the fort. His brother George helped. Charles Bent was largely at Santa Fe, at Taos, midway, and on the trail, until in 1846 he was appointed first American governor of New Mexico.
The next year the Mexicans and Pueblo Indians revolted against the American government, and killed him at his home in Taos.
Bent's Fort lasted through more than twenty years. Then William Bent offered to sell it to the Government for an army post. He asked $16,000; the Government proposed $12,000. They dickered. Colonel Bent would not yield one penny. He had a short stock of patience in dealing with white men or red men either. So in the summer of 1852 he blew up the fort with powder and marched away, to build another post, for Indian trade, thirty miles down-river.
This became Fort Wise, of the army, but was known to the settlers as "old" Fort Lyon.
Ten years after selling it to the Government, this time at his own price, in 1869 William Bent died, aged sixty, near the ranch that he owned only a few miles from the ruins of his celebrated Bent's Fort.