Historic Fort Reno

Fort Reno was built to protect an agency, not to fight a tribe. The post went up in 1874 on the North Canadian River, across from the Darlington Agency for the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho — the soldiers sent because Agent Miles reported the Cheyennes might attack, and because the government needed a stabilizing presence on a reservation it was pressuring to farm. The fort's most dramatic episode came from the other direction: in September 1878, three hundred Northern Cheyenne — people the army had forcibly relocated south after Little Bighorn — broke out and started home under Dull Knife and Little Wolf, a 1,200-mile flight that ended with the survivors allowed to stay in Montana.

Buffalo Soldiers and Cheyenne and Arapaho scouts served together at the post — the 9th and 10th Cavalry and the 24th and 25th Infantry policing the territory alongside the Indian scouts, while the fort's troops supervised the runs that opened Oklahoma to settlement in 1889, '92, and '94. In 1908 the cavalry post became a remount station — raising horses and mules for the army — and during World War II a POW camp sat on its eastern acreage while Route 66 hummed past.

The post cemetery on its cedar knoll — surrounded by a rock wall, graves dating 1874 to 1947 — holds the whole span: cavalry troopers, Indian scouts, Buffalo Soldiers, and German POWs buried at the remount station's fence line.

Fort Reno is the archive's agency file — the post built to guard the Darlington Agency, from which the Northern Cheyenne escaped toward home in 1878, where Buffalo Soldiers served beside Indian scouts and the land rushes were supervised.