Road Trip Through History: Fort Robinson
Previously the post headquarters, now the history museum.
Forts and so-called “Indian agencies” and the relationship between them were a recurring them on our trip through the western plains.* The simple version is that agencies were established at various locations to manage trade and treaty obligations between the United States and the Native American nations. In theory, the agencies were intended to insure that both sides of the trade honored the rules and to negotiate disputes between them. But as treaties were negotiated and reservations were established, the relationships between the agencies and those nations became, let’s just say complicated. Increasingly, forts were established nearby to protect the agencies.**
For the most part, our experience of Indian agencies and forts was limited to historical markers. Most of the historical sites we passed were well off our path, and the sheer distances we were traveling each day meant we were less inclined to wander off the trail than we have been on previous trips. But Fort Robinson State Park was right on the way to our next planned stop.
Fort Robinson was an active military post for 74 years, from 1874 to 1948. Today, it is surrounded by a 22,000 acre state park. My guess is that for many park guests, the historical museum located in the 1905 military post headquarters is something to do on a rainy day or when people are worn out from too much outdoor fun. There certainly weren’t many people there during our visit. (In all fairness, we got there about an hour before the museum closed.)
The post was established in 1874 to “protect” the Red Cloud Agency. It was named after Lieutenant Levi Robinson who was killed by Native Americans from the Red Cloud Agency*** and played a critical role in government strategy in the Sioux Wars of 1876-1880.*** With the arrival of the railroad in the mid-1880s, which made it possible to move soldiers quickly as needed, Fort Robinson became the most important military post in the region, with its soldiers involved in the Cheyenne Outbreak, the Fort Robinson massacre (one guess as to who was massacred), the death of Crazy Horse, the rise of the Ghost Dance movement, and the tragic events at Wounded Knee. The fort served as cavalry re-mount station in World War I and as a K-9 dog training center and camp for German POWs in World War II.
Here are two of the tidbits that caught my imagination:
- The second and third Black graduates from West Point served as lieutenants with the 9th Cavalry, one of two all-Black cavalry regiments (known as buffalo soldiers) that were stationed at Fort Robinson in 1885. For the most part, they were involved in support services, like repairing telegraph lines. But the 9th Cavalry was given the job of monitoring the Ghost Dance movement and the 10th Cavalry was sent on a long winter march to rescue the all-white 7th Cavalry from Drexel Mission, where it was trapped after the Battle of Wounded Knee.
- The official K-9 corps was a new development in World War II. People were asked to donate their dogs to serve in the K-9 corps. (Personally, I cannot imagine donating a family pet for military service. It seems like a horrible betrayal.) Almost 18,000 dogs arrived at the various training centers; about 8,000 failed the physical and mental assessment. (Roughly 30% of their human counterparts also were disqualified as physically or mentally unfit.)
All told, an excellent way to spend an afternoon.
*Every time I type that I hear “Out of the clear blue of the western sky, comes Skyyyyy Kiiiing” in the back of my head. Which I realizes dates me. Though not as much as you might think. I only knew the show as a re-run in the late afternoon dead spot after day-time television and before the evening news. It was clearly dated at the time and I loved it.
** Neither the museum exhibits or any of the sources I consulted on Fort Robinson in particular or the Indian agencies in general addressed the question of who was being protected from what. Which leads me right back to the questions of who tells the story of the United States’ westward expansion, how they tell it, and what assumptions they begin from. (And by they, I mean all of us.) As I write these posts, I am almost painfully aware of how seldom this is addressed in even the best exhibits. And how easy it is to let my mind slide over its absence.
***Which tells us something about point of view.
**** Which should probably be called the Lakota Wars—this period of western history is a verbal landmine for anyone who is relatively new to the details and trying to be conscious of colonialism in her language.
Travelers’ tip: Several of the buildings that served as quarters for soldiers and officers stationed at the fort have been converted to lodging for guests to the park. If we had known that ahead of time, we might have tried to spend the night.
Russia, Siberia, and the Fur Trade
And speaking of the fur trade, as I believe we were, the Russian fur trade did not begin in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest of North America. At the same time that French and British (and to a lesser extent, Dutch, and Swedish) fur traders were exploring the virgin forests of North America in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Russians were moving east toward the Siberian tundra in search of sable, also known as “soft gold,” the most expensive fur in the world.
A 19th century print of Cossacks collecting the fur tribute in Siberia, with all the problematic attitudes one would expect
Traders, trappers and hunters were drawn to Siberia by a “fur fever”comparable to the 1849 California gold rush. By the very nature of their work, they became explorers and conquerors. Some worked on their own. Others were employed by the state or by wealthy merchant agents. The line between the two groups was blurry. Many Cossacks, working in the service of the Russian tsar, amassed fortunes for themselves by trading and trapping illegally. Independent traders and hunters frequently worked for the state at the request of local commanders.
Independent fur traders and state employees were equally eager to trap sable, the preferred fur of the Russian nobility and monarchy. A single hunting season could make a poor man rich.
Russians did not find an empty wilderness when they first arrived in Siberia in the 1580s. Conflict was inevitable. Russian traders were in Siberia to exploit the fur wealth to be found on the hunting and grazing lands of nomadic reindeer-herding peoples. Where Russians saw the fur-bearing animals only as a commodity, Siberian nomads combined the necessity of hunting with reverence for the animals they hunted. (Is any of this starting to sound familiar?) Over a period of eighty years, the Russians, armed with guns, imposed their rule on the indigenous populations and forced them to pay tribute in the form of furs.
The Russian conquest of Siberia was a world-changing event that almost no one noticed. The fur trade paid for Peter the Great’s transformation of Russia from a backwoods state with one foot in Asia to a great European power.
*My normal sources for translating a historical currency into today’s dollars failed me totally. I had assumed I would have to do a multi-step conversion from rubles to pounds, using seventeenth century values. Then from seventeenth century pounds to modern pounds, and hence to modern dollars. (A questionable process by any standard.) But none of my sources had a value for rubles prior to 1880. So let’s just agree that 300 rubles in 1650 would be worth quite a bit in today’s dollars and leave it at that.
History on Display: The Museum of the Fur Trade
Our long road trips usually begin with an idea or a destination. * In the case of our recent trip through the Western plains, our route was shaped by two museums that have been on our road trip bucket list for a long time. One of those was the Museum of the Fur Trade, just outside Chadron, Nebraska. We were not disappointed.
My Own True Love and I both came to our interest in the history of the American fur trade through our fascination with the French voyageurs along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, and the worldwide conflict between the British and French that ended with the defeat of France in 1763. The Museum of the Fur Trade places that story not only within its immediate context, but within a much larger story of fur-trading in North America. It starts early, with the fur trade’s connection with European cod-fishing off the Great Banks of Canada in the early seventeenth century. (I am continually fascinated by the way one trading commodity leads to another.) The museum describes how fur traders organized themselves in temporary partnerships each year and how the voyageurs created a complex system of written contracts to protect themselves from the big fur companies like the Hudson Bay Company and the American Fur Company. (The exhibit makes the off-hand comment that the voyageurs were the first unionized labor force in North America. An interesting idea, but I’m not sure it’s entirely accurate.)
The museum follows the fur trade west beyond the Great Lakes and the great rivers, and through the shift from beaver to buffalo and seal. I already knew something about fur trappers in the Rocky Mountains and Russian fur trappers in Alaska and along the Pacific coast, though I learned more. But I had no idea that furs were a significant component of North American and Russian trade with China, for instance.
The biggest “wow I didn’t know that” moment for me was the comancheros, an ethnically mixed group of traders who developed a distinctive form of trade in what is now New Mexico with the Comanches, Kiowas and other nations of the Southern Plains in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Unlike what I think of as the British and French model, in which traders set up posts and trappers brought furs to them, the comancheros loaded up their burros and oxcarts with trading goods and travelled into the plains in search of their highly mobile customers. I suspect there is a lot more to this story that I don’t know: I was once again reminded that the history of the American southwest in particular, and Spanish rule in the Americas in general, is one of my historical blind spots.
The museum’s exhibits are relatively old fashioned—lots of stuff, not many interactive exhibits. But the stuff is used effectively, particularly the extensive section on trade textiles and the ways they were used by the Native Americans who acquired them. Exhibits on the fur trade often leave out the Native American side of the exchange; the Museum of the Fur Trade includes it as integral part of the story. And rightly so.**
The museum also has a small number of outdoor exhibits, most notably a meticulous reconstruction of the James Bordeaux trading post, which is one of the rare reconstructions to be included in the National Register of Historic Places.*** The museum is located on the site of the trading post, which was founded by James Bordeaux in 1836 and operated longer than any other trading post in the area. In 1872, the Bordeaux family sold the post to Francis (Bushy) Boucher, who was the son-in-law of Spotted Tail, the head chief of the Brule Lakota. Boucher expanded the trading post business to include an illegal operation selling arms and ammunition to Native Americans who were resisting the United States’ efforts to force them onto reservations. **** In August, 1876, army troopers confiscated 40,000 rounds of Winchester ammunition from Boucher and closed the post. It was in ruins by the time the first homesteaders reached the area along with the railroad in 1885.
In short, the museum is well worth a visit if you’re planning a trip through the western plains.
*Following the Great River Road from its source in Minnesota to its end in Louisiana has kept us amused for several trips now. We have plenty of Great River Road yet to travel.
**In a recent issue of my newsletter , I talked about the stories we tell and the point of view from which we tell them and shared some questions that a reader/listener/viewer can ask if they want to identify the holes in a particular version of a story. (Because there are always holes, no matter how well-intentioned the historian/curator/artist/novelist/reporter/human is.) One of those questions is “Who or what is missing from the story?”.
***I must admit that I did not enjoy the outdoor exhibits as much as I usually do. The sign warning visitors to watch out for rattlesnakes left me a little distracted. I hate snakes.
**** There are suggestions that Bordeaux also sold guns under the counter to the Lakota, though on a smaller scale, in the years after the Civil War when the buffalo robe trade was in decline. Like Boucher and other French-American fur traders over the centuries, Bordeaux had family ties with the Native American people with whom he traded. His wife was a Brule Lakota and his brother-in-law was Swift Bear, and influential chief and adherent of Spotted Tail. Sometimes the allegiances are more complicated than the historical marker would suggest.