Fort Keogh: The Post That Ended the Northern Plains Wars
Montana
The broad flat ground west of Miles City was once the most consequential military post on the northern Great Plains.
Fort Keogh was established in August of eighteen seventy-six, in the weeks immediately following the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Colonel Nelson Miles planted his cantonment at the confluence of the Yellowstone and Tongue Rivers, a site chosen because the Yellowstone provided a resupply route and the Tongue River valley led directly into the country where Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse had their winter camps.
Miles was aggressive and relentless. Before the permanent buildings were even finished, he was fighting. His troops clashed with Crazy Horse's Lakota warriors at the Battle of Wolf Mountain in January of eighteen seventy-seven, forcing a costly winter fight that wore down the resistance. Little Wolf and Two Moons brought their Northern Cheyenne people to surrender at the cantonment in the spring of that same year. On December sixteenth, eighteen seventy-six, a party of Sioux that included a young Sitting Bull arrived under a white flag.
The fort was renamed Fort Keogh in November of eighteen seventy-eight in honor of Captain Myles Keogh, who had died at the Little Bighorn. It became the largest military post in Montana Territory, housing roughly fifteen hundred soldiers and their families at its peak.
After the Indian Wars ended the army found a new use for the site. By around nineteen hundred Fort Keogh had become an Army remount depot, one of several facilities where the United States Army bred and trained horses for military service. Cowboys and civilian wranglers worked alongside soldiers, training animals destined for cavalry units around the world, including tens of thousands shipped to European battlefields during the First World War.
The army's hold on the post wound down over the following decades, with the Department of the Interior taking over the military reservation by the nineteen twenties. Today the site operates as a federal livestock and range research station, studying the same shortgrass prairie that once grazed the largest bison herd on earth.
