People

Riding to the fort

NPS

The existence of Bent’s Fort begins with the people who first called this land home. Cheyenne and Arapaho encampments stretched across the Southern Plains when Charles Bent first met with Cheyenne Chief, Yellow Wolf. The two developed a long-standing business partnership where Native American nations built a local empire in buffalo robes. Trade at the post continued because of traders who passed by its front doors. Situated squarely on the Santa Fe Trail, the fort benefitted from merchant traffic. Fifty percent of traders traveled north from Mexico. Mexican interest went beyond commerce to the very construction of the fort itself. The structure’s towering walls rested entirely on the craftmenship of Mexican adobe masons. From its literal foundations, Bent’s Fort was an international enterprise.

With each passing year, commerce depended on Bent’s business relations within a vast international and cross-cultural network. An 1847 visitor, Josiah Gregg, comments, “It is seldom that such a variety of ingredients are found mixed up in so small a compass…” In his journal, Gregg describes an assembly of characters from diverse backgrounds speaking numerous different languages. Their purpose was friendly trade. Traders arrived in these Borderlands from all directions: Mexico, Canada, eastern and southern states, and territories and nations yet to be claimed by the United States. It was not uncommon to hear a mixture of Spanish, French, German and English dialects at this remote hub. In addition, dozens of tribal nations speaking their first language gathered from hundreds of miles away to hold trade councils. Meaningful negotiation increased allies and benefitted the way of life for all.

George Bent, born at the fort in 1843, recalled the fort employed as many as one hundred people at a given time. Work tended to be divided according to social class. Clerks, managers, bookkeepers, and doctors were educated in the East and held a measure of financial means to risk in the West. Skilled laborers like carpenters, wheelwrights and blacksmiths toiled to keep wagon wheels rolling. Tailors and gunsmiths served traders and merchants by keeping them clothed and supplied. Vaqueros made sure horses were trained and ready for exchange as the demand for transportation and horse trading increased. Cheyenne and Arapaho men hunted the buffalo while the women cleaned and prepared the heavy robes for trade. The seasonal nature of the buffalo robe trade meant most fort employees worked on a periodic basis. Winter was busiest. Former mountain men contributed their hunting and trapping skills to supply hungry fort visitors with necessary meat. Domestic work like cleaning, candlemaking and cooking fell to the fewest population of workers – women. There are only a handful on record, and almost all were non white, mixed race or enslaved.

As Bent’s Fort gained an economic foothold, political involvement grew. During the 1840s, aspiring figures had close ties with Bent’s Fort. Future Senator, Congressman, General and eventual Vice Presidential candidate, Francis Blair Jr., spent a good deal of time at the fort and alongside George Bent in New Mexico. U.S. consul and later lieutenant governor of New Mexico, Manuel Alvarez, worked closely with Charles Bent in Santa Fe to ease taxes on trade. Missouri’s own governor, Lilburn Boggs, married William Bent’s sister, Julia. And as families often look out for each other, William employed Bogg’s son, Thomas, as a company trader for ten years. Government-sponsored explorers like John C. Fremont saw Bent’s Fort as a convenient stopover for supplies and intelligence gathering. Moreover, the U.S. military took advantage of the strategic and defensive position the fort provided. Colonel Stephen Watts Kearney’s advance on Santa Fe during the U.S./Mexican War was made possible by the planning, warehousing, and staging done within the fort’s walls.

Even though trade ended at this location in 1849, the site of the fort continued as a reference point. From trading post to stagecoach stop to cattle stockade, the fort’s influence remained into the next century. Notable authors, historians and anthropoligists like George Bird Grinnell, George Ruxton, George Hyde and Francis Parkman, Jr. traveled through the Borderlands and recognized the national imprint that Bent’s Fort made on early American life in the West.

The multitude of people associated with Bent’s Fort enables the telling of numerous stories. They stretch across the continent and involve individuals and communities from various nations and traditions. Only some of the names are known to us today. Many others, whose identifications have slipped from time, were nevertheless essential to the changing rhythm of life in the Southern Plains during the 1800s. Bent’s Fort owes its enduring memory firstly to the Cheyenne and Arapaho who fueled the prosperous trading partnership and secondly to those who converged and adapted to life here during an era of great transition.