Camp Hancock: Bismarck's Oldest Surviving Building

In the summer of eighteen seventy-two, as Northern Pacific Railroad crews pushed tracks toward the Missouri River, the U.S. Army established a small post to protect them. They called it Camp Greeley, after newspaper editor Horace Greeley. The following year it was renamed Camp Hancock, in honor of Major General Winfield Scott Hancock, commander of the Department of Dakota.

Camp Hancock served as an infantry post from eighteen seventy-two to eighteen seventy-seven, then as a quartermaster supply depot and Signal Corps weather station for another seventeen years. Goods that supplied forts across the Dakota Territory moved through here by rail, wagon, and steamboat.

The log officers' quarters built in eighteen seventy-two is still standing downtown. It is the oldest building in Bismarck. A small state historic site preserves the structure and an early locomotive, a small piece of a large and consequential era.