Bent's Old Fort and the Friendship That Made Sand Creek Darker

William Bent built his trading post on the Arkansas River in eighteen thirty-three. It was made of adobe, with walls four feet thick, and it stood at the edge of the Great Plains where the mountains begin to show on the horizon. For the next sixteen years, until Bent abandoned it in eighteen forty-nine during a cholera epidemic among the Cheyenne and other plains nations, it was the most important commercial and diplomatic meeting point between the American republic and the Cheyenne and Arapaho nations.

The trade at Bent's Old Fort was genuinely reciprocal in its early decades. The Cheyenne and Arapaho brought buffalo robes and horses. American merchants brought metal goods, cloth, and food staples. William Bent married a Cheyenne woman named Owl Woman. His children grew up speaking Cheyenne. He was trusted at a level that few Euro-Americans had achieved with the southern plains nations, trusted enough that Cheyenne leaders sought his counsel on treaty questions and political matters.

Chief Black Kettle knew this fort. The chiefs who signed the Fort Laramie Treaty of eighteen fifty-one, which assigned the Arkansas River valley to the Cheyenne and Arapaho, knew Bent's family. The assurances of American friendship that those leaders had received over decades of trade were real and documented, which is part of what makes Sand Creek, thirty years later, comprehensible in the way that darkness is comprehensible: it required a relationship to betray.

The fort was designated a National Historic Site in nineteen sixty. The NPS interpretive materials there have worked, in recent years, to represent the full history, including the Cheyenne and Arapaho perspective on what happened to the relationship that was built here.

The adobe walls have been reconstructed. The Arkansas River is a hundred yards away. On the eastern Colorado plain in the afternoon light, it is not difficult to imagine what made people stop here, and stay, and build something.