FORT DILTS STATE HISTORIC SITE
Battlefield — Rhame, Bowman County, North Dakota
Status: Historic site · Access: Open to public
Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/fort-dilts-state-historic-site-rhame-north-dakota/

Battlefield associated with documented cultural history.

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.

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.

WHY THIS FILE MATTERS
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.

HISTORY — 1 documented facts
· 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.

SOURCES — 1 cited
· Fort Dilts State Historic Site — State Historical Society of North Dakota
  https://history.nd.gov/historicsites/dilts/index.html

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Methodology: https://haunthunt.com/methodology/ · Corrections: https://haunthunt.com/report/