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Survey of Historic Sites and Buildings
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BIG MOUND BATTLEFIELD
North Dakota
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Location: Kidder County, on an unimproved road,
about 10 miles north of Tappen.
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The Battle of Big Mound was one of the key
engagements in Gen. Henry Hastings Sibley's 1863 expedition from Fort
Ridgely, Minn., against the Santee Sioux who had sparked the uprising in
the Minnesota River Valley the previous year. Eluding his troops, they
had fled to Dakota and joined forces with the Tetons. On July 24 Sibley
surprised about 3,000 Sioux, consisting of friendly Sissetons and
Inkpaduta's hostiles, who were hunting buffalo near Big Mound. During a
parley one of Inkpaduta's warriors shot and killed a military surgeon,
Dr. Joseph Weiser. In a running battle the Indians fought tenaciously to
protect the retreat of their families but 13 died. Following this
victory, Sibley and General Sully won a series of triumphs over the
Sioux.
This 50-acre site, also known as the Burman and Camp
Whitney sites, is used for ranching. It is all in private hands except
for a small tract owned by the State. The slightly rolling terrain,
covered with prairie grass and dotted with lakes, is but slightly
impaired. A stone marker, on a cairn of rocks, indicates the spot of Dr.
Weiser's death and the beginning of the battle.
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FORT ABERCROMBIE
North Dakota
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Location: Richland County, just off U.S. 81,
eastern edge of Abercrombie.
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Fort Abercrombie (1858-77) was the first Army post in
present North Dakota and one of the earliest in the region. Situated on
the west bank of the Red River at the head of navigation, it protected
river traffic, travelers, and settlers. Logistical gateway to the
largely unexplored plains of the old Northwest, it was the jumping-off
place for prospectors proceeding over the northern route to the Montana
and Idaho goldfields, as well as emigrants and troops. The main road was
the Fort Totten Trail, pioneered in 1862-63 by Capt. James L. Fisk and
extending from Fort Snelling, Minn., via the North Dakota forts of
Abercrombie, Totten, Stevenson, and Buford to Fort Benton, Mont.
Fort Abercrombie also played a peripheral role in the
Santee Sioux uprising of 1862, which spilled over from Minnesota into
the Dakotas. In the latter part of August the Sioux attacked settlers in
the Red River Valley and many of them took refuge at the fort. On
September 3-6 several hundred warriors besieged it, and on September 26
reinforcements from Fort Snelling helped the garrison of Minnesota
Volunteers beat off another assault. The 1862-64 campaigns of Generals
Sully and Sibley in Minnesota and the Dakotas quelled the rebellion and
encouraged the spread of settlement in the area.
Fort Abercrombie State Historic Park includes a small
museum. A paved highway bisects the parade ground and divides the park
into two tracts. The only original remaining structure is the frame
guardhouse. The palisaded stockade and other buildings, built of wood
except for the brick magazines, have long since disappeared. A large
stockade and three blockhouses have been reconstructed. A marker near
the guardhouse indicates the site of a barracks.
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FORT ABRAHAM LINCOLN
North Dakota
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Location: Morton County, on N. Dak. 80, about 4
miles southeast of Mandan.
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Lt. Col. George A. Custer commanded this post in the
years 1873-76. It was the base for his 1874 expedition into the Black
Hills, in the wake of which miners poured into the region and inflamed
the Sioux. In the ensuing campaign against them, he and the 7th Cavalry
set out from the fort with Brig. Gen. Alfred H. Terry's column in 1876
on their ill-fated expedition to the Little Bighorn. After the debacle,
Terry returned to it, as did also the wounded survivors of Custer's
regiment in the steamer Far West.
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Fort Abraham Lincoln in the
1870's. (Minnesota Historical Society) |
The predecessor of the fort was a stockaded infantry
post called Fort McKeen, founded in June of 1872 on the west bank of the
Missouri across from the site of Bismarck, N. Dak., and moved in August
about 5 miles to the south on the river bluffs. In November Fort Abraham
Lincoln, a cavalry base activated on the plain to the southeast,
absorbed Fort McKeen. In time it grew into a major Army post. Its troops
accompanied the Yellowstone Survey Expedition of 1873, the last of three
expeditions surveying the route of the Northern Pacific Railroad; and
later protected construction workers.
During 1877 the garrison participated in the Montana
campaign against the Nez Perces. When they surrendered in October, it
helped escort them from Fort Keogh, Mont., to Bismarck, N. Dak., en
route to Fort Leavenworth, Kans. By the end of the 1880's the railroad
had been completed, most of the Indians had been confined to
reservations, and local settlers were numerous. The Army evacuated the
fort in 1891, by which time it was already falling into ruins and being
dismantled by settlers.
Fort Abraham Lincoln State Park includes the sites of
the two forts and several restored Mandan Indian earth lodges. The
locations of numerous buildings have been marked. Three blockhouses at
Fort McKeen have been reconstructed. The original flag pole of Fort
Abraham Lincoln stands in front of the Custer House marker. Only the
foundations remain of this 10-room home, where Custer lived while
commanding the post. A museum interprets the fort's history
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Officers of the 7th Cavalry and
their ladies at Fort Abraham Lincoln shortly before the regiment
departed for the Little Bighorn campaign. Custer is third from the left,
and his wife is the first lady from the left on the lower step.
(National Park Service) |
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FORT BUFORD
North Dakota
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Location: Williams County, on an unimproved road,
about 1 mile southwest of Buford.
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Barely able to cope with Indian depredations along
the Bozeman Trail, in 1866-68 the Army established a chain of forts
along the Missouri River, the other major route to the newly discovered
Montana goldfields. One of the new posts was Fort Buford, founded in
1866 near the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers in
hostile Indian territory. A leading Army bastion in the Dakotas and the
northern Plains region, it was a supply center and base for campaigns
against the Indians in the area. Its troops also settled many of them on
reservations, distributed annuities, and policed the region to restrain
traders illegally bartering ammunition and whisky with the Indians for
pelts. Prominent Army officers who visited the fort at one time or
another include Sherman, Sheridan, Custer, Miles, and Pershing.
In 1866, while Red Cloud was plaguing the Bozeman
Trail in Wyoming and Montana, Sitting Bull harassed the troops who were
hastily constructing Fort Buford, a one-company post, enlarged the next
year to a five-company installation with materials salvaged from the
nearby Fort Union trading post. Although Buford was never directly
assaulted and suffered few casualties, for the first 4 years it was
under continual siege. The Indians raided woodcutting, hunting, and
haying parties; rustled livestock; and attacked mail coaches running
between the post and Fort Stevenson, N. Dak.
Fort Buford figured prominently in the northern
Plains campaigns of the 1870's and 1880's. A main logistical base for
the campaigns against the Sioux and Cheyennes in Wyoming and Montana
that followed the Custer defeat in 1876, it handled many of the men and
supplies shipped up the Yellowstone and Missouri via wagon trains and
boats.
The nontreaty Nez Perces, defeated in the Battle of
Bear Paw Mountains, Mont., in 1877, following their exodus from Idaho,
passed through Fort Buford en route from Fort Keogh, Mont., to Fort
Leavenworth, Kans. The post was also the scene of the surrender of
Sitting Bull and his followers. After they had crushed Custer's force,
they had sworn they would never accept reservation restraints and had
eluded the Army and escaped to Canada. Prevented from crossing the
international boundary to hunt buffalo by U.S. patrols, unwanted by
Canadian authorities, and suffering from the severe cold, the hungry and
tired group, reduced in number by defections to about 1,300, straggled
into Fort Buford in the spring and summer of 1881. From there they were
moved to Fort Yates, N. Dak. Sitting Bull was escorted from there to
Fort Randall, S. Dak., and imprisoned for 2 years.
Until the post's inactivation in 1895 the garrison
kept busy sending out routine patrols, policing the international border
to stop Indian movements in either direction, and furnishing troops to
guard railroad construction workers. The fort buildings were sold at
public auction and many of them were used in constructing the present
town of Buford.
About 36 acres of the Fort Buford reservation are
maintained as a State historic site, and an additional 160 acres are in
non-State ownership. Two of the buildings have survived in their
original location. One is a frame officers' quarters, which today serves
as a museum. The other is the stone powder magazine, whose roof the
State restored after a fire destroyed it. Some buildings have been
shifted in location and altered for modern use. These include the
morgue, until recently a farm residence; and a row of frame stable
sheds, apparently constructed from materials in the old barracks and
used in modern times as a barn and granary. Some foundations, possibly
those of the hospital, are visible not far from the powder magazine. The
soldier graves in the rehabilitated cemetery, south of the fort, have
been moved and only civilian graves remain.
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FORT RICE
North Dakota
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Location: Morton County, on an unimproved road,
about 1 mile south of the town of Fort Rice.
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Among the earliest of numerous Missouri River posts
and the first on the river in North Dakota, this fort was founded in the
summer of 1864 as a stockaded supply base by Brig. Gen. Alfred Sully
during his 1863-64 expedition into the Dakotas against the Sioux who had
been responsible for the 1862 Minnesota uprising. He used it again in
his campaign the next year into the same region. Subsequently the
primary mission of the fort was protection of river navigation, though
in July 1868 it was the scene of the signing by some of the upper
Missouri chiefs or their emissaries of the Fort Laramie Treaty (1868).
Sitting Bull, who sent his chief lieutenant, Gall, and other chiefs
refused to attend. Father Pierre Jean De Smet, special representative of
the Peace Commission that negotiated the Fort Laramie Treaty, who had
met with various chiefs of the region the previous year on behalf of the
Government at Forts Rice, Sully, and Berthold, had persuaded the Indians
to attend the 1868 council at Fort Rice. The three Yellowstone
Expeditions of the 1870's (1871, 1872, and 1873), which escorted parties
surveying the Northern Pacific Railroad, organized at the fort. The
establishment in the early 1870's of Fort Yates, some 32 miles to the
south, and Fort Abraham Lincoln, 25 miles to the north, brought about
the inactivation of Fort Rice in 1878.
Fort Rice State Historic Site, comprising 7 acres,
embraces a large portion of the fort area. The foundations of many of
the original buildings, log and frame except for the stone magazine,
have been marked. Two restored blockhouses stand on opposite corners of
the parade ground.
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Fort Rice in 1864. (Minnesota
Historical Society) |
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FORT TOTTEN
North Dakota
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Location: Benson County, on the Fort Totten Indian
Reservation, near N. Dak. 57, just south of the agency town of Fort
Totten.
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Located on the southeastern shore of giant Devils
Lake, this fort (1867-90) was one of a group founded to protect the
overland route extending across Dakota Territory from southern Minnesota
to the goldfields of western Montana. Its second major mission was
control of the surrounding reservation, formally established for the Cut
Head, Wahpeton, and Sisseton Sioux in 1878 in accordance with an 1867
treaty. When the Army departed, the U.S. Government acquired the fort
and adjacent lands, and used the buildings for an Indian boarding school
into the modern period. In 1960 the Bureau of Indian Affairs transferred
the bulk of the fort site to the State for historical purposes.
Fort Totten State Historic Park consists of the
well-preserved post, almost unchanged since its establishment a century
ago. Practically all of the brick buildings of the 1870's, numbering 15,
remain. Although altered somewhat, mainly in the interiors, they are in
excellent condition. They include officers' row, two-story duplex and
multiplex family units; barracks; commissary store houses; and bakery. A
museum is in the hospital building.
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Officers' row, Fort Totten, as
it appears today. (North Dakota Historical
Society) |
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FORT YATES and STANDING ROCK AGENCY
North Dakota
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Location: Sioux County, town of Fort
Yates.
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Standing Rock Agency (Grand River Agency II) was
founded in 1873 near the sacred "standing rock" of the Sioux. It was the
successor of Grand River Agency I (1868-73), located farther down the
Missouri close to the mouth of the Grand River. Roughly the southern
half of the Standing Rock Reservation, extending a few miles below the
Grand River, was in north-central South Dakota. Adjoining it on the
south was the Cheyenne River Reservation, S. Dak. Established in 1868
and guarded by Fort Bennett (1870-91), the latter stretched west of the
Missouri River as far south as the Cheyenne River.
Fort Yates, N. Dak. (1874-1903), protected the
Standing Rock Reservation, home of the Hunkpapa, Yankton, and Blackfeet
Sioux. Together with the Cheyenne River (S. Dak.), Red Cloud (Nebr.),
and Spotted Tail (Nebr.) Reservations, Standing Rock was a center of
unrest during the Sioux troubles of the 1870's; in 1876 it furnished men
and supplies to Sitting Bull's hostiles. In October 1876, following the
Custer disaster and well before Sitting Bull departed for Canada, Brig.
Gen. Alfred H. Terry marched down from Fort Abraham Lincoln, N. Dak.,
with a force of 1,200 men and disarmed and dismounted the reservation
Indians at Standing Rock, as well as at the Cheyenne River Agency. As
the fugitive Sioux capitulated, the Hunkpapas among them were sent to
Standing Rock.
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Inspection at Fort Yates. Date
unknown. (photo David F. Barry, Denver Public Library, Western
Collection) |
After Sitting Bull's 2-year imprisonment at Fort
Randall, S. Dak., following his surrender with his band in 1881 at Fort
Buford, N. Dak., he returned to live with his people at Standing Rock
Agency near his birthplace on the Grand River of South Dakota, about 40
miles south of Fort Yates and the Standing Rock Agency. Throughout the
1880's he resisted the efforts of the Indian Bureau to make farmers of
his people and strip him of his authority. The Ghost Dance movement of
1890, in which he was a leading spirit, was strong on the Standing Rock
Reservation but the Indian agent controlled it well. Nevertheless, at
the peak of the Ghost Dance rebellion, Maj. Gen. Nelson A. Miles decided
to arrest certain ringleaders. Accordingly, on December 15, 1890, James
McLaughlin, the Standing Rock Indian agent, dispatched a detachment of
39 Indian police and four volunteers to apprehend Sitting Bull at his
home. At first he submitted but then responded to his followers'
opposition and resisted. One of his band shot a policeman and set off a
scuffle, in which six of the police and eight Indians died, among them
Sitting Bull and one of his sons. When cavalry reinforcements arrived to
quiet the infuriated Hunkpapas, many of them fled southward toward the
Cheyenne River and set off the grim chain of events that ended in the
Battle of Wounded Knee.
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Indian police at Standing Rock
Reservation about 1890. Red Tomahawk, front center, killed Sitting Bull.
(photo David F. Barry, Smithsonian Institution) |
No historic structures have survived at Fort Yates or
Standing Rock Agency, around which the town of Fort Yates has grown up.
Although Standing Rock is still a Sioux agency, the old frame buildings
have given way to modern buildings. The sacred "standing rock" of the
Sioux stands on a bluff above the Missouri at the northern end of town.
The Indian police who died at the same time as Sitting Bull are buried
in the town's Catholic Cemetery. Sitting Bull was buried in the post
cemetery until 1954, when his body was moved to a Sitting Bull memorial
overlooking the Oahe Reservoir near Mobridge, S. Dak. The reservoir has
inundated the sites of the Cheyenne River Agency and Fort Bennett.
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KILLDEER MOUNTAIN BATTLEFIELD
North Dakota
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Location: Dunn County, on an unimproved road,
about 11 miles northwest of Killdeer.
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Gen. Alfred Sully mounted
campaigns against the Sioux in 1863-65 and won notable victories in
North Dakota in the Battles of Whitestone Hill and Killdeer Mountain.
(Minnesota Historical Society) |
At this site in the summer of 1864 Brig. Gen. Alfred
Sully culminated his campaign against the Sioux who had been responsible
for the uprising in Minnesota 2 years earlier and inflicted a final
defeat on the fleeing Chief Inkpaduta. After his victory at Whitestone
Hill, N. Dak., in September 1863, Sully wintered on the Missouri River
near present Pierre, S. Dak., where reinforcements from Fort Ridgely,
Minn., and Wisconsin increased his command to 2,200. On July 28 at the
southern base of Killdeer Mountain, his troops engaged 1,600 Santees and
Tetons, killed and wounded about 100 of them, and burned their
village.
The State owns 1 acre of the battlefield, on which
stand a large marker and the gravestones of two soldiers killed in the
battle. The rest of the site, except for a few cultivated patches and an
artificial lake, is privately owned ranchland. Ranch buildings and
corrals occupy the site of the Sioux camp.
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WHITESTONE HILL BATTLEFIELD
North Dakota
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Location: Dickey County, on an unimproved road,
about 5 miles southwest of Merricourt.
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In the Battle of Whitestone Hill (September 3, 1863),
the first of General Sully's two decisive victories in his 1863-64 Sioux
campaign following the 1862 revolt in Minnesota, he dealt a heavy blow
to Chief Inkpaduta. Surrounding Sully's advance guard, 4,000 Sioux
confidently took advantage of the opportunity and applied battle paint.
Sully used the time to bring up his troops. Some 300 braves died, and
the troops captured 250 women and children. Army casualties were 22
deaths and 50 wounded.
Whitestone Hill Battlefield State Historic Site
commemorates the battle. The natural terrain, low hills covered with
prairie grass, has been only slightly disturbed. Around a monument in
the center of the battlefield are 22 markers, each listing the name of a
soldier who died. A small exhibit at a picnic shelter interprets the
battle.
http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/soldier-brave/sitec12.htm
Last Updated: 19-Aug-2005
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