Fort Fetterman

Fort Fetterman was named for a massacre and built for a war the treaty kept postponing. The 1867 post rose on a bluff above the North Platte where the Bozeman Trail branched north — named for Captain William Fetterman, killed with all eighty of his men near Fort Phil Kearny the winter before. When the 1868 treaty closed the other Bozeman forts, Fetterman became the army's last supply base in the heart of the country Crazy Horse called 'a source of irritation.'

The fort's war was mostly logistics — the staging point for Crook's 1876 campaigns that marched toward the Little Bighorn, the post where Jim Bridger, Calamity Jane, and Buffalo Bill passed through on the way to everything else. The garrison's own record is a first winter under canvas in 'violent and almost constant gales,' then adobe, wood, and stone growing into the post that held the North Platte crossing for fifteen years.

The fort's second life was wilder than its first — abandoned in 1882, it became Fetterman City, the 'hog ranch' town of saloons and brothels serving the cattle boom, until the railroad reached Douglas seven miles south and killed it. Owen Wister visited and used it as the model for Drybone in his fiction. The restored officers' quarters and ordnance warehouse are the state's historic site now — the fort Crazy Horse singled out, standing over the river bend where the frontier's supply line finally ran out of frontier.

Fort Fetterman is the archive's supply-base file — the 1867 North Platte post named for the Fetterman Fight's dead commander, Crook's staging ground toward Little Bighorn, abandoned into a hog-ranch town the railroad then abandoned too.