Bent's Old Fort, Crossroads of the Southern Plains

Beside the Arkansas River northeast of La Junta, you can visit a full-scale reconstruction of the most important trading post on the southern plains in the first half of the nineteenth century. Bent's Old Fort was built in eighteen thirty-three by brothers Charles and William Bent and their partner Ceran St. Vrain, at a moment when this stretch of river was the international border between the United States and newly independent Mexico.

For sixteen years, from eighteen thirty-three to eighteen forty-nine, the fort was the only major permanent American settlement on the Santa Fe Trail between Missouri and the Mexican settlements of New Mexico. It was a genuine crossroads of cultures. Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho came to trade buffalo robes, horses, and furs. Comanche and Kiowa bands traveled through. Hispanic traders from Taos and Santa Fe passed through heading east. Mountain men brought beaver pelts. The Bent brothers hired Mexicans, Anglo-Americans, and Native American workers and spoke multiple languages among them.

William Bent had particularly deep ties to the Cheyenne. He married a Cheyenne woman named Owl Woman, and later her sister Yellow Woman. Their children were fluent in English and Cheyenne. For a brief period, this adobe-walled compound in the dry Colorado grasslands was one of the rare places where the Plains Indian world and the expanding American republic met on roughly equal terms.

That balance did not last. In the summer of eighteen forty-nine, a catastrophic cholera epidemic swept through the southern Cheyenne, killing thousands. The bison-robe trade that had sustained the fort was collapsing. William Bent offered to sell the fort to the United States Army, but negotiations broke down. Rather than surrender it for what he considered an insultingly low price, Bent packed everything valuable and in August of eighteen forty-nine destroyed the fort himself, reportedly with explosives, and abandoned the site.

The National Park Service reconstructed the fort in nineteen seventy-six based on archaeological investigation and historic records. Walking through it gives a vivid sense of what American expansion looked like from the inside of a trade enterprise that needed peace to survive.