Fort D. A. Russell: From Cavalry Post to Nuclear Arsenal
Near Cheyenne, Wyoming
The military base on the western edge of Cheyenne has been continuously occupied longer than almost any other installation in the United States Air Force. It began as a cavalry post. It may end as the vanguard of the nation's next nuclear arsenal.
In the summer of eighteen sixty-seven, the transcontinental railroad was racing westward across Wyoming. The Union Pacific needed protection, and the Army needed a post large enough to anchor the entire region. They chose Crow Creek Crossing, the future site of Cheyenne, and on July fourth of that year, units of the Thirtieth Infantry began building what would become Fort D. A. Russell, named for General David A. Russell, a Union officer killed in Virginia during the Civil War.
Cheyenne grew up around the fort. The relationship was symbiotic from the start: the fort needed the town's supplies and services; the town needed the fort's payroll and stability. In eighteen eighty-four the War Department declared it a permanent post, and the construction that followed gave Cheyenne some of the most striking Victorian brick architecture in the West. The fort evolved through the Indian Wars, the Spanish-American War, and both World Wars, growing steadily larger and more permanent with each conflict.
The most dramatic transformation came in the early nineteen sixties, when the Air Force began deploying Atlas intercontinental ballistic missiles in underground silos across southeast Wyoming. By nineteen sixty-three those were replaced by Minuteman missiles, and by the early nineteen seventies Warren Air Force Base, as the fort had been renamed in nineteen thirty after Wyoming Senator Francis E. Warren, commanded one of the largest nuclear arsenals ever assembled in one place. Today the base operates one hundred fifty Minuteman Three missiles in silos spread across an area roughly the size of Connecticut.
The fort never stopped being a frontier post. The frontier just changed. The enemy is not across the ridge anymore; it is on the other side of the planet. And the base is now preparing to receive the Sentinel, the next generation intercontinental ballistic missile, which will replace the aging Minuteman fleet and make Warren the first installation in the country to carry the new weapon.
