Francis E. Warren and the Fort That Became a Base

The installation on Cheyenne's western edge has been continuously active since July fourth, eighteen sixty-seven, when the army established Fort D. A. Russell to protect the Union Pacific Railroad's construction crews from the disruptions that inevitably followed a workforce moving through contested land. That makes it one of the longest-running active military installations in the United States.

The fort was renamed for Francis Emroy Warren in nineteen thirty. Warren had arrived in Cheyenne in eighteen sixty-eight, a year after the city's founding, and built a career that ran from merchant to mayor to territorial governor to the state's first United States Senator. He held that Senate seat for thirty-seven years, dying in office in November of nineteen twenty-nine at eighty-five. He had also, at nineteen, received the Medal of Honor for his conduct at the Siege of Port Hudson during the Civil War.

His daughter married General John Pershing in nineteen oh five.

When the installation converted to Air Force authority in nineteen forty-nine, it entered the era that defines it today. The base received the first fully operational intercontinental ballistic missiles in the Air Force inventory in nineteen sixty, a fleet of Atlas rockets. Today the Ninetieth Missile Wing maintains one hundred fifty Minuteman Three ICBMs on constant alert, dispersed across nine thousand six hundred square miles spanning Wyoming, Nebraska, and Colorado, controlled from fifteen Missile Alert Facilities buried in the grassland.

Driving east from Cheyenne toward Nebraska on Interstate eighty, you pass through the footprint of that field without any visible sign that it is there.