People have visited Fort Benning land since the last Ice Age about 12,000 years ago. The existence of these earlier visitors came to light in the form of stone spear points, analyzed by archeologists under the direction of the U.S. Army.The prehistoric hunters, called Paleo-Indians, were perhaps tracking wooly mammoths, elephant-like creatures standing 12 feet tall.

Others who found their way to the sand hills and forests along the Chattahoochee River included:

    Native American ceremonial mound builders, known as the Mississippians, who lived in the area from about AD 900 to 1540;

    Spanish explorers, searching for treasure, who traveled through the region from 1539 into the1700's with devastating impact on the native people;

    James Edward Oglethorpe, British founder of the colony of Georgia, who journeyed across hundreds of miles of wilderness to Kashita, the important Creek Indian town where Lawson Army Airfield now stands; and

    William Bartram, renown naturalist and explorer, who visited the Yuchi Indians in 1776 and later wrote about their village:

...it is the largest, most compact and best situated Indian town I ever saw....