Fort Assinniboine and the Buffalo Soldiers

Six miles south of Havre, on the rolling grassland of the Hi-Line, stand the brick ruins of what was once the largest military post ever constructed in Montana. Fort Assinniboine was built in eighteen seventy-nine, three years after the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and its mission was deliberately intimidating. The Army wanted a fortress capable of preventing Sitting Bull's Lakota, who had retreated into Canada after the battle, from crossing back into the United States in force.

What they built was enormous. A hundred and four permanent buildings spread across a military reservation originally covering seven hundred thousand acres. The fort became Montana's military headquarters, responsible for the entire northern border and for keeping watch over the Blackfoot Confederacy and the Milk River Valley. It was, in the language of the time, a statement of permanence.

The soldiers most closely associated with the post were the Buffalo Soldiers of the Tenth Cavalry and the Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth Infantry. These African American regiments had earned the name, reportedly given by Cheyenne warriors, out of respect for their courage and tenacity in battle. The Tenth Cavalry arrived at Fort Assinniboine in eighteen ninety-two and made it their regimental headquarters four years later. They carried out one of the largest forced relocations on the northern Plains, rounding up nearly six hundred Cree people who had taken refuge on the American side of the border and escorting them back into Canada.

The officer who commanded that operation was a young lieutenant named John J. Pershing. He arrived at Fort Assinniboine in eighteen ninety-six, led H Troop of the Tenth Cavalry, and built such a reputation working alongside the Buffalo Soldiers that they nicknamed him Black Jack, a name that stayed with him for the rest of his career. When the Spanish-American War began in eighteen ninety-eight, Pershing took the Tenth to Cuba, where they fought alongside Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders at San Juan Hill.

The war emptied the fort. Without an active threat on the Canadian border, the Army no longer needed such a massive installation on the Montana plains. Fort Assinniboine was abandoned in nineteen eleven and eventually became an agricultural experiment station. The brick barracks and officers' quarters remain, weathered but standing, a monument to the soldiers who held the edge of empire.