Fort Morgan: From Overland Trail Post to Glenn Miller's Hometown

Fort Morgan sits where the South Platte River cuts through the northeastern Colorado plains, and its founding is inseparable from two very different American eras: the frontier military era of the eighteen sixties, and the golden age of the big band era of the nineteen thirties.

The military post came first. In eighteen sixty-four, in the aftermath of the Sand Creek Massacre, Cheyenne and Arapaho raiding parties struck settlements and stage stations across the central plains. The Overland Trail, the vital mail and emigrant route connecting the Missouri River to Denver and beyond, became dangerous to travel. The Army responded by establishing a series of camps along the route. One of them, Camp Wardwell, was built near the South Platte crossing in eighteen sixty-five. It was a basic mud-and-log installation, manned by soldiers assigned to protect wagon trains and mail riders from attack. In eighteen sixty-six, the post was renamed Fort Morgan in honor of Colonel Christopher Morgan, an officer who died that year without ever having visited Colorado. The fort was abandoned in eighteen sixty-eight, once the threat along the trail subsided.

The town that grew up near the old post site became a ranching and farming community, watered by the South Platte. Sugar beets became a major crop in the early twentieth century. But what Fort Morgan is known for most, outside of Morgan County agricultural circles, is a trombone player who went to high school here.

Glenn Miller arrived with his family around nineteen eighteen. He played football for the local high school and was named best left end in Colorado. But it was music that grabbed him. He was already playing trombone and arranging songs, and by nineteen twenty-one, when he graduated, he had decided the music business was his future. He dropped out of the University of Colorado after three semesters, moved to Los Angeles, then New York, and spent the better part of fifteen years scrambling as a session trombonist and arranger.

Then in nineteen thirty-eight, his orchestra finally broke through at the Glen Island Casino in New Rochelle, drawing record crowds. In the years that followed, Chattanooga Choo Choo earned the first gold record in history, selling over one million two hundred thousand copies. By the time he enlisted in World War Two and disappeared over the English Channel on December fifteenth, nineteen forty-four, Glenn Miller was the best-selling recording artist in the country. Fort Morgan keeps his name on the water tower and his memory in the local museum.