NPS Santa Fe National Historic Trail
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  • 0909. Santa Fe Trail at Fort Larned

    Photo of stagecoach wagon drawn by four mules.
    This stagecoach, typically called a "mud wagon" was used to transport mail up and down the Santa Fe Trail.

    By the 1860s, Santa Fe Trail traffic was at its peak and tensions with American Indians, whose way of life was under increasing threat, were climbing. Warriors of several Plains Indian tribes including the Kiowa, Comanche, Apache, and Cheyenne occasionally attacked the wagon trains. To counter such attacks the army set up a military post on October 22, 1859, west of Lookout Hill (now Jenkins Hill) on the bank of the Pawnee River about five miles from where it joins the Arkansas River. In June 1860 the camp was moved farther west, where a more durable fort was built and named for Col. Benjamin F. Larned, U.S. Paymaster-General (1854-62). 


    Fort Larned was part of a chain of military posts set up for Santa Fe Trail protection and escort duty. Others were forts Mann (1847), Atkinson (1850), Union (1851), Wise (1860 - later named Lyon), Zarah (1864) Dodge (1865), Aubrey (1865), and Camp Nichols (1865).

    Although Trail traffic declined and the Indian threat ceased after 1868, there was still much development and activity at Forts Larned, Lyon, and Dodge. For several critical years Fort Larned was a principal guardian of Santa Fe Trail commerce. In 1864, after the Sand Creek Massacre in eastern Colorado and after the War Department forbade travel beyond Fort Larned without armed escort, the post supplied guard detachments for mail stages and wagon trains. It served as the base for Maj. Gen. Winfield S. Hancock’s abortive 1867 campaign against the Plains tribes--intended to impress the Indians with U.S. military strength, it only terrified them and intensified hostilities. Fort Larned was a key post in the Indian wars from 1859 to 1869. In 1868, violating the Treaty of Medicine Lodge signed the year before, the Cheyennes attacked several wagon trains along the Santa Fe Trail and raided settlers as far south as the Texas panhandle. This signaled a general outbreak, and the Kiowas, Comanches, and Arapahos also began to raid from Kansas to Texas. Maj. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan commanded the Military Division of the Missouri then. Sheridan ordered Lt. Col. George A. Custer and the 7th Cavalry to thrust south into Indian Territory.

    Custer’s campaign culminated in an attack on Black Kettle’s Cheyennes along the Washita River in the pre-dawn hours of November 27, 1868. Black Kettle was among those killed as the camp of 51 lodges was destroyed. This ended organized Indian threats to the area around Fort Larned, although skirmishes and scattered resistance continued.


    For most of the 1860s Fort Larned also served as an agency of the Indian Bureau. The agency negotiated to pay annuities of clothing and other necessities to the Cheyennes, Arapahos, Kiowas, and Comanches in return for their staying on reservations and keeping the peace. The agency was abolished in 1868 when the tribes were moved to new reservations in Indian Territory.


    Ironically, Fort Larned’s last important job helped to make obsolete the Trail it so long protected. The close of the Civil War released the nations’s industrial energies, especially the railroad’s surge across the plains. Promising cheaper, faster transportation, the railroad shattered old ideas of distance. In the early 1870s, as the Santa Fe Railroad pushed west from Topeka, Fort Larned soldiers protected those building it. In July 1878, nearly six years after the railroad was completed through Kansas, the fort was abandoned, except for a small guard force left to protect the property. In 1883 Fort Larned military reservation was transferred from the War Department to the General Land Office, U.S. Department of the Interior.


    You can learn more about the Santa Fe Trail at the Santa Fe National Historic Trail website.