Fort Walla Walla

The Walla Walla Valley has had a military post of one kind or another for more than one hundred fifty years, and the story of how that fort changed tells you a great deal about how the Pacific Northwest was absorbed into the United States.

The first American military presence here came in the aftermath of the Whitman killings in eighteen forty-seven. A Hudson's Bay Company post called Fort Nez Perces had operated here since eighteen eighteen, but the United States needed its own installation. The third and permanent Fort Walla Walla was established on March eighteenth, eighteen fifty-eight, as a cavalry outpost on a one-square-mile reserve during the ongoing Pacific Northwest Indian Wars. Lieutenant Colonel Edward Steptoe used it as his base of operations, riding out from here that May on an expedition that ended in a devastating ambush by Palouse and Spokane warriors to the north.

For the next half century, Fort Walla Walla served as the anchor of American military power in the interior Northwest. Dragoons, infantry, artillery, and cavalry all cycled through its barracks. Soldiers from the fort fought in engagements during the Nez Perce War of eighteen seventy-seven and the Bannock-Paiute War of eighteen seventy-eight. By the end of the nineteenth century the reservation held sixty buildings spread across six hundred forty acres. Repeated congressional efforts to shut it down were beaten back each time until the Army finally closed the post in nineteen ten.

What remains today is the Fort Walla Walla Museum, fifteen acres of the original reserve now containing four exhibit halls and a seventeen-building pioneer village. The cemetery on the grounds holds soldiers killed at the battles of Cottonwood and White Bird Canyon during the Nez Perce flight of eighteen seventy-seven. The physical layout of the post is largely intact, making it one of the better-preserved examples of a frontier cavalry installation in the western United States.