Fort Abraham Lincoln: Custer's Last Command

In the summer of eighteen seventy-two, the U.S. Army built an infantry post on a bluff above the confluence of the Heart and Missouri Rivers, just south of present-day Mandan. They called it Fort McKeen. By November the name had changed to Fort Abraham Lincoln. A cavalry post was authorized the following year, and in the autumn of eighteen seventy-three, six companies of the Seventh Cavalry arrived under the command of Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer.

By eighteen seventy-four, Fort Abraham Lincoln was a nine-company command of infantry and cavalry, the largest military post in the region. Custer occupied a large double-roofed house near the river with his wife, Elizabeth, whom he called Libbie. She described the house and the social life of the fort in detail in her memoirs. Their years at Fort Lincoln were, by most accounts, the happiest of their marriage.

The fort's purpose was to protect Northern Pacific Railroad survey crews pushing west through Sioux territory. That mission generated conflict. Custer's Black Hills Expedition of eighteen seventy-four, launched from this fort, confirmed the presence of gold in the Black Hills, land sacred to the Lakota and protected by treaty. The gold rush that followed made war inevitable.

On May seventeenth, eighteen seventy-six, Custer led six hundred men of the Seventh Cavalry out of Fort Abraham Lincoln while the regimental band played Garry Owen. Wives and children lined the road to watch them leave. Forty days later, on June twenty-fifth, Custer and two hundred eight officers and enlisted men under his direct command were killed at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in Montana.

Libbie Custer never returned to Fort Lincoln. The post was abandoned in eighteen ninety-one. Fort Abraham Lincoln State Park, established in nineteen oh seven, is the oldest state park in North Dakota.