Beyond the Old Frontier: Adventures of Indian-Fighters, Hunters, and Fur-Traders

by George Bird Grinnell

The work of the carpenter and blacksmith, whose shops stood at the back of the fort, was chiefly on the wagons, which they kept in good order. For them winter was the busy season, for it was their duty to have everything in good order and ready for the train to start out in April.

In the store of the fort—presumably for sale to travellers or for the use of the proprietors—were to be found such unusual luxuries as butter-crackers, Bent’s water-crackers, candies of various sorts, and, most remarkable of all, great jars of preserved ginger of the kind which fifty or sixty years ago used to be brought from China. Elderly people of the present day can remember, when they were children, seeing these blue china jars, which were carried by lines of vegetable rope passed around the necks of the jars, and can remember also how delicious this ginger was when they were treated to a taste of it.

At the post were some creatures which greatly astonished the Indians. On one of his trips to St. Louis St. Vrain purchased a pair of goats, intending to have them draw a cart for some of the children. On the way across the plains, however, one of them was killed, but the one that survived lived at the fort for some years and used to clamber all over the walls and buildings. The creature was a great curiosity to the plains people, who had never before seen such an animal, and they never wearied of watching its climbing and its promenading along the walls of the fort. As it grew older it became cross, and seemed to take pleasure in scattering little groups of Indian children and chasing them about. The Southern Cheyennes went but little into the mountains at this time, and but few of them had ever seen the mountain sheep. If they had, they would not have regarded the domestic goat with so much wonder.

The post was abundantly supplied with poultry, for pigeons, chickens, and turkeys had been brought out there, and bred and did well. At one time George Bent brought out several peacocks, whose gay plumage and harsh voices astonished and more or less alarmed the Indians, who called them thunder birds, Nŭn-ūm´ā-ē-vĭ´kĭs.

There was no surgeon at the fort, Colonel Bent doing his own doctoring. He possessed an ample medicine-chest, which he replenished on his trips to St. Louis. He had also a number of medical books, and no doubt these and such practical experience as came to him with the years made him reasonably skilful in the rough medicine and surgery that he practised. With the train he carried a small medicine-chest, which occasionally came into play.

For many years Bent’s Fort was the great and only gathering-place for the Indians in the Southwestern plains, and at different times there were large companies of them present there.

At one time no less than three hundred and fifty lodges of Kiowa Apaches were camping near the fort on the south side of the river, and at another, according to Thomas Boggs, six or seven thousand Cheyennes were camped there at one time. When the Kiowas, Comanches, and Apaches were camped about the fort the number of Indians was very large. It must be remembered that prior to 1849 the Indians of the Southwest had not been appreciably affected by any of the new diseases brought into the country by the whites. This was largely due to the forethought of William Bent, who, by his action in 1829, when smallpox was raging at his stockade, protected the Cheyennes and Arapahoes at least, and very likely other Indians, from the attacks of this dread disease.

Shortly after the great peace between the Cheyennes, Arapahoes, Kiowas, Comanches, and Apaches, which was made in 1840, the two great camps moved up to Bent’s Fort, the Cheyennes and Arapahoes camping on the north side of the river, the Kiowas, Comanches, and Apaches on the south. It was a great gathering of Indians, and the feasting, singing, dancing, and drumming were continuous. Though peace had just been made, there was danger that some of the old ill feeling that had so long existed between the tribes yet remained. Colonel Bent, with his usual wisdom, warned his employees that to these camps no spirits whatever should be traded. He recognized that if the Indians got drunk they would very likely begin to quarrel again, and a collision between members of tribes formerly hostile might lead to the breaking of the newly made peace. This was perhaps the greatest gathering of the Indians that ever collected at Fort William. How many were there will never be known.

Such, briefly, is the story of Bent’s Fort, the oldest, largest, and most important of the fur trading posts on the great plains of the United States. Unless some manuscript, the existence of which is now unknown, should hereafter be discovered, it is likely to be all that we shall ever know of the place that once held an important position in the history of our country.

Bent’s Fort long ago fell to ruins, but it has not been wholly forgotten. Up to the year 1868 the buildings were occupied as a stage station, and a stopping-place for travellers, with a bar and eating-house; but soon after that, when the railroad came up the Arkansas River, and stage travel ceased, the old post was abandoned. From that time on, it rapidly disintegrated under the weather.