Fort Vasquez and the Last Days of the Mountain Men

Just off the highway near Platteville, an adobe-walled fort sits reconstructed on the exact site where two mountain men tried to cash in on the tail end of the beaver trade, and discovered they were almost too late.

In eighteen thirty-five, Louis Vasquez and Andrew Sublette obtained a trading license from William Clark, the Superintendent of Indian Affairs in Saint Louis, and built a fur post on the east bank of the South Platte River. The location was deliberate: midway between Fort Laramie to the north and Bent's Old Fort to the south, sitting astride what trappers called the Trapper's Trail. They called it Fort Vasquez, and they hired some of the most storied names of the mountain man era to work it. Jim Beckwourth, the trapper and frontiersman who had lived among the Crow Nation, worked the post. So did Baptiste Charbonneau, the son of Sacagawea, born during the Lewis and Clark expedition.

The Cheyenne and Arapaho brought buffalo robes and beaver skins to trade, and for a few years the fort did well. But the collapse of the beaver pelt market in the early eighteen forties, driven by changing European fashion tastes, was already underway. Three competing forts crowded the same stretch of river. In eighteen forty, unable to turn a profit, Vasquez and Sublette sold the post to a rival firm. It closed entirely in eighteen forty-two.

The adobe walls melted back into the prairie over the following decades. In nineteen thirty-five, a Works Progress Administration crew reconstructed the fort using original brick that was still present in the soil. The site is now a museum operated by History Colorado, the only physical reminder of the short, competitive, and ultimately doomed era when the South Platte River was mountain man territory.