{"id":244,"slug":"fort-dilts-state-historic-site-rhame-north-dakota","story":[{"heading":null,"paragraphs":["Fort Dilts is the wagon circle that became a fort — the sod wall thrown up in September 1864 by Captain James Fisk's emigrant train, ninety-seven wagons bound for the Montana gold fields on a shortcut nobody had mapped. Fisk had expected General Sully's army ahead of him; instead he had fifty convalescent soldiers and a Hunkpapa Lakota force — led, by the record, under Sitting Bull — that had just fought Sully at Killdeer Mountain and was in no mood to let a military-escorted train pass through.","The attack on September 2 killed nine; the train crawled twelve miles under harassment and then circled on September 4, stacking a six-foot sod wall around eighty wagons. Inside it they buried three of their dead — including Jefferson Dilts, whose name the fort took — and held out sixteen days until eight hundred cavalry from Fort Rice broke the siege. The would-be miners went home; the sod walls are still there, eight miles northwest of Rhame, looking much as they did.","The file keeps Fort Dilts: the shortcut that failed, the Hunkpapa siege, the sod breastwork, and the wagon train that never saw the gold fields.","Fort Dilts is the archive's siege file — Fisk's shortcut, the circled wagons, and the sod fort the prairie kept."]},{"heading":"Why this file matters","paragraphs":["Fort Dilts is the archive's siege file — the 1864 wagon train, the sixteen-day siege, and the sod walls that still stand in Bowman County.","A wagon circle built in a day keeps its walls — the file's suggestion being that Fort Dilts's hold is the improvisation: the bad route, the stacked sod, and the fort named for a dead soldier that outlasted the expedition."]}],"name":"Fort Dilts State Historic Site","aliases":[],"type":"BATTLEFIELD","type_label":"Battlefield","cats":["DARK_HISTORY","BATTLEFIELD"],"groups":["dark-history"],"desc":"Battlefield associated with documented cultural history.","full_desc":"Fort Dilts State Historic Site is a battlefield in Rhame, North Dakota. Battlefield associated with documented cultural history. It sits in the archive under dark history and battlefields. The dossier holds 1 documented fact — the record is history-forward, no paranormal claims on file. The site is open to visitors. For HauntHunt it is exactly the kind of file the archive exists for: a real place, a real record, and a story still being told.","address":null,"city":"Rhame","county":"Bowman","state":"North Dakota","postal":null,"region":"Midwest","lat":46.234649,"lon":-103.654982,"coord_kind":"CITY","status":"HISTORIC_SITE","access":"PUBLIC","access_notes":null,"ownership":null,"website":null,"phone":null,"year_built":null,"year_opened":null,"year_closed":null,"year_demolished":null,"designation":null,"current_use":null,"research_notes":"Discovery pass. Earliest attestation, primary history, precise location and current access require independent enrichment.","stage":"SOURCE_RESEARCH","quality":{"level":"MEDIUM","score":65,"dims":{"location_confidence":0.75,"identity_confidence":0.65,"historical_confidence":0.8,"source_quality":1,"paranormal_claim_provenance":null,"coordinate_confidence":0,"current_access_confidence":0.7,"freshness":0.65}},"claims":[],"history":[{"description":"Preserves remains of the September 1864 wagon-train siege and soldiers' graves. Ground with a documented war record gives the file real substance; this entry is part of it. The record holds it as fact — documented, not retold. The detail is preserved in 'Fort Dilts State Historic Site'. Documented ground is what separates this file from pure legend — this is part of it.","evidence":"HISTORICALLY_VERIFIED","date_start":null,"date_end":null,"confidence":null,"source":{"name":"Fort Dilts State Historic Site","url":"https://history.nd.gov/historicsites/dilts/index.html","publisher":"State Historical Society of North Dakota","type":"GOVERNMENT","authority":1}}],"legends":[],"entities":[],"events":[],"investigations":[],"encounters":[],"media":[],"persons":[],"visitor":{"admission_fee":"Free; donations welcome","last_verified_at":"2026-09-14T10:36:19+00:00","source":{"name":"Fort Dilts State Historic Site","url":"https://history.nd.gov/historicsites/dilts/index.html","publisher":"State Historical Society of North Dakota","type":"GOVERNMENT","authority":1}},"sources":[{"name":"Fort Dilts State Historic Site","url":"https://history.nd.gov/historicsites/dilts/index.html","publisher":"State Historical Society of North Dakota","type":"GOVERNMENT","authority":1}],"conflicts":[],"wiki":{"title":"Fort Dilts","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Dilts","desc":"Historic fort in North Dakota, United States","extract":"Fort Dilts was a makeshift sod fort built near Rhame, North Dakota, United States, in September 1864 to fend off attacks by Hunkpapa Sioux Indians led by Sitting Bull upon an encircled wagon train of would-be gold-miners and a small military escort of convalescent soldiers.","img":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/19/Fort_Dilts_2018.jpg/330px-Fort_Dilts_2018.jpg?utm_source=en.wikipedia.org&utm_campaign=api&utm_content=thumbnail","score":90,"lat":46.27861111,"lon":-103.77583333},"counts":{"claims":0,"history":1,"legends":0,"entities":0,"sources":1}}