Junction US 50—Site of Bent's Fort; 4 miles, unnumbered road.

Dirt road in good condition. No accommodations.                

The road branches northwest from US 50 (see Tour 9a), 0 miles, 10 miles west of Las Animas (see Tour 9a). The route crosses the Arkansas River to the junction with a dirt road, 1.3 miles, which it follows west (L) to the junction with another dirt road, 1.9 miles, where the route again turns left to the SITE OF BENT'S FOKT, 4 miles, completed in 1832, the most important trading post of its time in the Rocky Mountain region. The site is marked by a monument.

The builders of the fort, Charles, Robert, George, and William Bent, and their partner, Ceran St. Vrain, played leading roles in the early development of trade in the West. The Bents were four of seven sons of Silas Bent, presiding judge of the St. Louis Court of Common Pleas. William, who could speak Siouan fluently, was named Wa-Si-Cha-Chis-Chil-La (Little White Man) by the Sioux, for he was only 15 years old when he first came into the territory in 1823 as an employee of the American Fur Company.

In 1826 the Bents built their first stockade, farther up the Arkansas River, midway between Pueblo and Canon City. Two years later, while encamped near the mouth of the Purgatoire, they were visited by a party of Cheyenne, who declared the first post to be too far from the buffalo range for the Indians to frequent, and suggested that a new fort be built on this spot.

Although construction began that year, completion was delayed by Charles, who insisted that it should be built of adobe instead of logs. He went to Taos, engaged a number of Mexican workmen to make and lay the brick, and sent a wagonload of Mexican wool to mix with the clay as a binder.

Fort William, later known as Fort Bent, was 180 feet long and 135 feet wide, the walls 15 feet high and 4 feet thick. At its southwest and northwest corners were bastions, 30 feet high and 10 feet in diameter, with loopholes for muskets and openings for cannon. The second-story walls of the bastions were hung with sabers, heavy lances with long sharp blades, and muskets for use in case of an attempt to scale the walls. To prevent such attempts at night, the tops of the walls were thickly planted with cacti, which grew so luxuriantly that they overhung the sides.

Stores, warehouses, and living quarters opened into a graveled patio, in the center of which a brass cannon was mounted to impress the Indians. The rooms around the walls of the court were roofed with poles covered with grass and brush, overlaid with clay and a covering of gravel. The walls projected four feet above the roofs, which served as a promenade. The floors of the rooms were of hard-packed earth.

The east and main gateway was fitted with two large plank doors, reinforced and fireproofed with sheet iron studded with nails. The west or rear gate, opening into the corral, was constructed similarly, as was the south gate facing the river. A square watch tower was surmounted with a belfry, topped with a flagstaff. On the western side of the fort, outside the main walls, was a corral as wide as the fort, to hold large herds of cattle or horses. The corral walls were eight feet high and three feet wide at the top An adobe house stood two hundred yards to the southwest of the fort; ice cut from the river in winter was stored in it to insure a fresh meat supply in summer.

The fort was a rendezvous of trappers, traders, plainsmen, Indians, Mexicans, adventurers, and Government troops on occasion. Trading began with the opening of the gates at sunrise. The Indians, whose tents were pitched around the fort, were soon passing in and out, at times filling the courtyard. While traders and clerks were busy at their work, patrols walked the battlements with loaded muskets, and guards stood in bastions with burning matches to light their carronades. At sunset the Indians returned to their tents, and the great gates were swung shut for the night. Vigilance at Fort Bent was never for a moment relaxed.

Among the luxuries of the fort were a billiard room and a bar, at the insistence of Robert and George Bent, who joined their brothers later and desired recreation in the wilderness. The bar dispensed a potent liquor known as "Taos Lightning."

Fort employees had various duties. Some always remained on the premises, guarding it, trading with Indians and trappers, keeping books. Others looked after the livestock; still others had charge of wagon trains that hauled furs to the States and brought back fresh stocks of merchandise. Veteran traders visited distant Indian camps to barter for peltries. At its height of activity 100 men were regularly employed at Fort Bent; its volume of trade rivaled that of John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company.

Bill Williams, Dick Wootton, and other noted trappers made the post a rendezvous; Kit Carson was employed by Bent as a hunter from 1831 until 1842, when he joined Fremont's first expedition into the Rocky Mountains. Fremont used the fort as a base of supplies; Kearney and his Army of the West rested here in 1846; General Sterling Price and his command, en route to Mexico in 1847-48, traveled by way of Bent's Fort and enlisted William Bent to guide them to Taos. From this brief association with the Army, William retained the honorary title of colonel.

William Bent married Owl Woman, daughter of White Thunder, a Cheyenne medicine man. Owl Woman died at the birth of a daughter, Julia, and William married her sister, Yellow Woman. After the Mexican War, Charles Bent, who had married Inezita Jaramillo, sister of the wife of Kit Carson, was appointed first Territorial Governor of New Mexico. On January 19, 1847, while visiting his family in Taos, he was killed by Mexican and Pueblo Indian rebels.

After his brother's death, William Bent continued the business of Bent & St. Vrain. Just when St. Vrain withdrew from the firm is not known, but he was a partner as late as 1850. With the lessening demand for beaver pelts and the decimation of the buffalo, trading became less profitable each year. Bent attempted to sell the fort to the Federal Government, but negotiations were so slow that in 1852, after loading his goods on 20 large wagons, each drawn by six yoke of oxen, he blew up the fort and moved five miles down the river to Short Timber Creek. Some of his men were sent with goods to trade with the Indians on the Platte; others he sent to a point on the Arkansas where Fort Lyon now stands. In the spring of 1853 Bent established still another fort about forty miles down the river (see Tour 9a).

In 1859 William Bent was appointed United States Indian Agent for the Cheyenne and Arapaho but resigned the following year. He had entered into a contract to haul Federal Government supplies about the time he abandoned his fort here in 1852 and continued in that business until 1862. When hostilities with the Plains Indians became serious in 1864, Bent was employed to visit the various camps in an attempt to localize the trouble. But with troops roving the country, attacking Indians wherever found, it proved impossible to control the tribes. The Sand Creek Massacre (see Tour 8a) in the fall of 1864 put an end to the old life on the upper Arkansas; within a few years the Indians of the region were forced onto a reservation in Oklahoma. In his last years Bent was separated from the people among whom he had married and lived peacefully for 40 years. The old trader, perhaps the greatest of the Plainsmen, died at the home of his daughter, Mary, near the Purgatoire River, May 19, 1869.