Fort Kearny: First Soldier on the Oregon Trail

By the late eighteen forties, tens of thousands of emigrants were streaming west along the Platte River Road, and Congress decided they needed protection. In eighteen forty-eight, the Army established Fort Kearny on the south bank of the Platte River, naming it for General Stephen Watts Kearny. The post marked the start of the great trail highway: past here lay most of the long road across plains and mountains to Oregon or California.

Soldiers at the fort repaired wagons, treated the sick, and escorted wagon trains during the Indian wars of the eighteen sixties, though the fort itself was never attacked. At its peak in the early eighteen sixties, Fort Kearny was also a station for the Pony Express and later a waypoint for the transcontinental telegraph. Once the Union Pacific Railroad was built across Nebraska, the fort's purpose faded.

It was ordered abandoned in eighteen seventy-one, and its buildings were later torn down and hauled away. Today Nebraska's Fort Kearny State Historical Park preserves the site, with a museum and a reconstructed blacksmith shop, near the city of Kearney.