Fort Lyon: Gateway to Sand Creek

Fort Lyon on the Arkansas River has carried three names and two locations since its founding in eighteen sixty as Fort Wise. Renamed Fort Lyon in eighteen sixty-two for Union General Nathaniel Lyon, it served as the staging point for Colonel John Chivington's Third Colorado Cavalry before the Sand Creek Massacre of November twenty-ninth, eighteen sixty-four, when soldiers killed between one hundred fifty and two hundred Cheyenne and Arapaho people camped under a U.S.

flag of truce. The fort was later rebuilt on higher ground after flooding, and served as a frontier military post through eighteen eighty-nine. In the twentieth century, the buildings became a veterans hospital.

The site is now managed as a Colorado state veterans community center, its history as the launching point for one of the worst atrocities of the Indian Wars rarely marked at the entrance.