Council Bluffs Blockhouse Site
Near Omaha, Iowa
A boulder here marks the spot where Council Bluffs began. In eighteen thirty-seven, United States dragoons built a log blockhouse on this bluff above the Missouri River. It was the first building in what would become the city.
The soldiers came to keep the peace for the Potawatomi, Ottawa and Chippewa people who had just been moved onto these lands, protecting them from the Sac and the Dakota Sioux, who had threatened war. The fort did not last long as a military post. By eighteen thirty-eight the Jesuit missionary Father Pierre Jean De Smet and his companions were using the blockhouse and nearby cabins to run a Catholic mission to the Potawatomi, which lasted only a few years.
The blockhouse is long gone, but this marker, placed by the county historical society in nineteen seventy-one, fixes the place where the story of the city first took root.
