Destruction
In 1849 when a great cholera epidemic struck the Oklahoma and other plains Indians, William Bent abandoned Bent's Fort and moved his headquarters north to Fort Saint Vrain on the South Platte. When he returned south in 1852, after salvaging what he could, he burned the fort and relocated his trading business to his log trading post at Big Timbers, near what is now Lamar, Colorado. Later, in the fall of 1853, Bent began building a stone fort on the bluff above Big Timbers, Bent's New Fort, where he conducted his trading business until 1860 when the building was leased to the United States government and renamed Fort Wise. It was there that the Treaty of Fort Wise was signed on February 18, 1861 by the United States and a few Cheyenne and Arapaho chiefs. Old Fort Lyon, as Fort Wise was renamed in 1862, was built of timber by army troops in 1860 about half a mile west in the Arkansas River bottom. It was abandoned and replaced by new Fort Lyon near what is now Las Animas, Colorado in 1867.
When the fort was reconstructed in 1976, its authenticity was based on the use of archaeological excavations, paintings and original sketches, diaries and other existing historical data from the period.
Read more about this topic: Bent's Old Fort National Historic Site
Famous quotes containing the word destruction:
“The least pain in our little finger gives us more concern and uneasiness than the destruction of millions of our fellow-beings.”
—William Hazlitt (1778–1830)
“In nothing was slavery so savage and relentless as in its attempted destruction of the family instincts of the Negro race in America. Individuals, not families; shelters, not homes; herding, not marriages, were the cardinal sins in that system of horrors.”
—Fannie Barrier Williams (1855–1944)
“If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)