FORT ROBINSON, Northwest Nebraska

Fort Robinson was constructed and staffed in 1874 to monitor the distribution of supplies and beef promised to the Sioux Indians in return for peace. The fort worked to protect the Red Cloud Agency that had been set up by the Native Americans. In addition, because the area of the Platte River Valley had become a hotbed of chaos, the soldiers sometimes were called to duties involving cowboys from the Texas Trail, gold prospectors, and usually peaceful pioneers passing through Scotts Bluff. The cleft in the foothills of the Rockies to the west called Scotts Bluff was only a few miles away.

The fort's lands comprised 22,000 acres and were used in diverse ways over the long period it was staffed. It saw Indian clashes, including the killing of revered leader Crazy Horse, the first black troopers to be deployed there, military training and training of canines for war service, and the Remount Program where quality stallions were sent to the fort to be bred with suitable mares to improve cavalry stock. The troopers found the fort to be pleasant duty and, in their spare time, founded a Polo team.

Today the fort is a state park. The building shown above was the enlisted men's quarters and now houses visiting tourists. It has a dining room and gift shop today. One can board owned horses in the former cavalry barns for a fee -- a sort of horse motel. A swimming pool, wonderful hiking in rolling, pleasant, treed countryside, and visits to the many existing and well-maintained fort buildings are among the popular attractions. This scenic part of Nebraska has rugged river beds, huge ranches in the Sand Hills country, buttes and valleys inviting exploration.

ODD SAND HILLS OF NEBRASKA NORTH OF PLATTE RIVER

FAMOUS SAND HILLS OF NEBRASKA

 

This view is near Chadron at the northwest edge of the hills.

 

I had no idea that, as we drove west along the North Platte on #26 and north on #385, we bordered one of the Midwest's most famous areas. The rolling hills look like just another extension of more modest hills and plains. Wrong! The 20,000 acres of Sand Hills in the north of the Platte Valley lie atop the Ogallala Aquifer of 172,000 square miles that provides drinking water and irrigation water to portions of eight adjoining states. No wonder the grass is green in spring.

When I saw the hills in 2015, I realized I had driven through them about 10 years ago on an assignment in Kansas and South Dakota. I had been surprised by the virtual wilderness of grassy hillocks and hills, punctuated by ponds and smallish lakes along the winding road. For many miles I saw nothing but grass and water and wondered about it. Clearly, I had been driving through the Sand Hills.

Perhaps 8,000 years ago the hills were, indeed, sand or alluvial deposits left by receding glaciers and a major drought. The complex terrain was and is wonderful for an array of wild animals but, when farmers looked at it in the 1800s, they found the surface land so shallow that cultivation was not practical. The sand or dust would simply blow away, creating a vast desert.  Late in the 1870s, though, ranchers found it made outstanding grazing land for special animals -- cattle that also became quite wild, roaming the thousands of grassy acres. Large ranches prospered and still do, although fewer.  One can imagine cowboys loping through the tall grass between ponds and lakes that made  roundups challenging.

 

The unusual and specialized lands are thought to be the largest sand dunes in the Western Hemisphere and were designated as a National Natural Landmark in 1984. I am sure the Conestoga wagoneers heading west to the Columbia River avoided them totally.

 

 

EMIGRANTS ROLL ALONG THE NORTH PLATTE RIVER

Familiar to most who have studied about the Oregon Trail is CHIMNEY ROCK

The old Oregon Trail is studied by most people with a beginning at Independence on the Missouri River, today a part of the Kansas City extended area. The emigrant's route followed the Missouri north and veered westward along the Platte River. From its headwaters in Jackson County, Colorado, near the border of Wyoming, a rugged site in the Rocky Mountains., the river now known as the North Platte had merged with the lesser South Platte near today's town of North Platte, more than 700 miles later,  and flowed eastward as one. Thus, the pioneers were traveling upstream all the time, whether headed for the Columbia River or toward California on the South Platte.

 On the North Platte most made a small jog southward to avoid Lake McConaughy. then a swampy area, and continued northwesterly along fairly agreeable terrain to today's Bridgeport, crossing the Sidney -Deadwood gold trail (Hwy #385 now) mentioned in an earlier blog. From there to the familiar crags of Scott's Bluff, where an easy pass through the increasingly rising lands and rugged buttes had been found a few miles south of the North Platte, the travel become more difficult.

Familiar to anyone reading about the pioneers and the Oregon Trail or Mormon Trail are rock formations such as Chimney Rock and the Scott's Bluff itself.  Indians plagued some trains, more curious and interested in what objects or foods they could get from the trains than in killing the emigrants. With dread of the Indians and misinformation the emigrants were not the friendliest of travelers, either. One might feel sad that the early mingling of two (or more) racial groups and cultures that the days did not go better. An Indian friend of mine once commented to me that displacement of one people by another had been going on forever. I am not sure that makes it any easier to bear.

Disease and accidents were big killers of emigrants, lack of food and water, too, with virtually no medical care among the travelers. Well-known are accounts of throwing away of much too heavy furnishings along the trail or of the breakdown of over-challenged horses or oxen (pioneers found that slow oxen proved more durable than fast horses). So it was when the emigrants began to reach the upper limits of the Plains and face the rugged country between them and the Columbia River of Oregon and the green, watered pastures of the Willamette country.

What few accounts of the trails relate is the unusual land adjacent to the North Platte route -- the Sand Hills of Nebraska. See the next blog.

 

EMIGRANT WAGONS AS EARLY AS 1841.

The lone wagon shown against Scott's Bluff is the type that had to be lowered over Windlass Hill. See text below.

We have talked about Ogallala and Sidney to explain the relationship to the westward movement as being in the middle of an area along the North and South Platte rivers . Here geography resulted in the ongoing arrival of future residents of the Pacific coastal states via the Columbia River (pretty much straight west of the Platte) and California via the Mohave Desert and plains. We need to backtrack a bit to the earlier 1800s.

 

In the beginning, the valley of the Platte was a logical entry through the increasingly rugged sets of buttes and mountains that must be overcome. As early as the 1820s fur trappers, most of them traveling alone or in small groups, used the Platte as the route to the Rocky Mountains to look for beaver. Beaver hats popular with wealthy Easterner dudes and, even more, perhaps, British "toffs." created a booming market for beaver fur.

 

 The Native Americans, however, were increasingly  concerned about the inroads of pioneers into their hunting grounds. William Ashley and his men began to use the Platte corridor to avoid the Lakota and Cheyenne tribes with homelands more to the north from 1824 to 1827.  In 1832, Benjamin Bonneville successfully traveled through the Platte area and built a  trading camp or small fort in Wyoming that was a failure. However, Bonneville continued on to the Columbia River, where Fort Astor and later Fort Vancouver were operated by Hudson's Bay people and viewed him rightly as a competitor. Bonneville proceeded then to explore the California cutoff trail that emanated at the junction of the North and South Platte of today's Nebraska. It tended to follow what is today I-80, formerly the Lincoln Highway, first transcontinental highway.

 

You have heard of the "Green Mountain boys" These were Rocky Mountain area trappers who decided to have an annual sort of trade fair, where potential buyers and sellers (usually individuals or small partnerships) met somewhere in the Rockies to trade, usually Wyoming. These affairs turned out to be for riotous living, drinking, meeting females (mostly local Indians smitten with gifts of goods never before imagined). More business minded, Ashley used 10 mule-drawn wagons and 81 men to protect the booty to cross the Wind River Mountains, and reported to the government of the feasibility of such travel.

 

The first known party to travel through the Platte Valley was the Bidwell-Bartleson Party in 1841. The wagon trains would continue to bring new western residents toward the Pacific until after the transcontinental railroad was completed to their destinations in 1869. Wagons continued to roll in ever fewer numbers but on through the 70s, thus mingling with gold prospectors and cattlemen in the Platte area for awhile.

 

During my recent explorations of the North Platte and northwest corner of Nebraska area, I visited with keen interest a wagon train barrier that became known as Windlass Hill at what is now called Ash Hollow State Historical Park. The name "Windlass" says it all. It was a deep valley where emigrant wagons and teams were stumped for awhile. They figured out how to lower the wagons into the valley by fastening them to teams of oxen at the top of the slope or to strong men and ropes, thus slowing the descent to a manageable speed and avoiding damage. Once down into this verdant, spring-fed valley of green grass and one of the only tree groves in the surrounding area, the travelers tended to hang out there for several days to rest, maybe dance a little, and let their teams of oxen or horses fill their bellies with good grass The valley continued as part of the Oregon Trail route. Today the hill still shows ruts from all those wagon wheels down the slope. Like me, many were thrilled to walk in or near the ruts "drug out of the dirt" fully 175 years ago!  In one case, a ravine maybe five feet deep has resulted, path for water drainage or collection, but mostly the ruts are shallow. As an historical park, a walkway has been provided all the way to the top of the slope. In 2015 during the seemingly endless rainy spring the place was a paradise of greenery. Can't you just see the hot, tired travelers stretched out on the grassy hillside and hear their laughter and banter as they relaxed, cooked, sewed their clothes, repaired damaged wagons, and enjoyed the relief to be down a stern barrier looking westward?

(Windlass Hill or Ash Hollow site is not far south of today's Lake Mcconaughy or village of Lewellen.)