El Reno, Oklahoma, Fort, Land Run, and Hitler's Soldiers

El Reno, Oklahoma, sits at a crossroads that has been contested, negotiated, and claimed multiple times in a hundred and fifty years, and each layer left something behind.

Fort Reno was established in the summer of eighteen seventy-four as a military camp to control the Southern Cheyenne and Southern Arapaho peoples following an outbreak of violence that led to the Red River War. The camp became a permanent installation on July fifteenth, eighteen seventy-four, named for General Jesse Reno, who had been killed at the Battle of South Mountain in Maryland during the Civil War. The fort's job was to enforce the boundaries of the Cheyenne-Arapaho Reservation, which stretched westward from the North Canadian River to the Texas Panhandle.

The town of El Reno itself did not exist until after the Land Run of eighteen eighty-nine, when the Indian Territory west of the reservation opened to homesteaders. The western part of what became Canadian County, which fell within the old Cheyenne-Arapaho lands, opened in the land run of April eighteen ninety-two. Officials added the Spanish article el to distinguish the new community from another settlement called Reno City five miles to the northeast. The post office opened in June of eighteen eighty-nine.

El Reno grew at the intersection of the Old Chisholm Trail and, eventually, Route Sixty-Six. Jesse Chisholm had blazed the cattle trail in eighteen sixty-six, and millions of Texas longhorns passed through this corridor on the way to Kansas railheads.

Then came the Second World War and a stranger chapter. The federal government converted Fort Reno into a prisoner of war facility between September nineteen forty-two and October nineteen forty-three. More than thirteen hundred German soldiers, most of them captured from Field Marshal Rommel's Afrika Korps in North Africa, arrived by rail. They worked as laborers on local farms and, in nineteen forty-four, built a chapel on the old parade ground that still stands today. The last prisoners left in May nineteen forty-six.

Rommel's men, far from the Sahara, spent their captivity building a chapel in the Oklahoma countryside. El Reno holds all of it.