Bent's Old Fort National Historic Site
Bent's Old Fort (sometimes referred to as Fort William) is an 1833 fort located in Otero County in southeastern Colorado, USA. William and Charles Bent, along with Ceran St. Vrain, built the fort to trade with Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho Plains Indians and trappers for buffalo robes. For much of its 16-year history, the fort was the only major permanent settlement on the Santa Fe Trail between Missouri and the Mexican settlements. It was destroyed under mysterious circumstances in 1849.
The area of the fort was designated a National Historic Site under the National Park Service on June 3, 1960. It was further designated a National Historic Landmark later that year on December 19, 1960. The fort was reconstructed and is open to the public.
Read more about Bent's Old Fort National Historic Site: History, Destruction, In Popular Culture, Gallery
Famous quotes containing the words bent, fort, national, historic and/or site:
“This swamp is a monument to death. Snakes, alligators, quicksand, all bent on one thing: destruction.”
—Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1922–1978)
“How often we read that the enemy occupied a position which commanded the old, and so the fort was evacuated! Have not the school-house and the printing-press occupied a position which commands such a fort as this?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The cultivation of one set of faculties tends to the disuse of others. The loss of one faculty sharpens others; the blind are sensitive in touch. Has not the extreme cultivation of the commercial faculty permitted others as essential to national life, to be blighted by disease?”
—J. Ellen Foster (1840–1910)
“If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The site of the true bottomless financial pit is the toy store. It’s amazing how much a few pieces of plastic and paper will sell for if the purchasers are parents or grandparent, especially when the manufacturers claim their product improves a child’s intellectual or physical development.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)