Council Bluff: Frontier Post
Fifteen years later, in 1819, President James Monroe dispatched a military expedition (the Yellowstone Expedition, led by Colonel Henry Atkinson) to establish a series of forts along the Missouri. These forts were to support the American fur trade and counteract British influence on the northern plains. The 6th US Infantry and 1st Rifle Regiments made up the military portion of the expedition, which arrived at the Council Bluff site on September 19. It was located near Fort Lisa and Cabanne's Trading Post, private fur trading establishments operated by major traders who were based in St. Louis, Missouri.
The expedition stopped to build Cantonment Missouri, a winter camp along the river bottom below the bluffs. Abandoning plans to establish more forts upstream, the soldiers settled in for winter. The winter of 1819-20 was very harsh; a shortfall of government contractors left the garrison without sufficient supplies. The soldiers suffered widespread scurvy (due to poor nutrition and lack of vitamin C), which claimed the lives of over 200 of the 1,120 men that first winter. Estimates of the civilian deaths is possibly as high as double the military dead; no records were kept of their losses.
In the spring of 1820, the Missouri River flooded Cantonment Missouri. The soldiers built a permanent camp atop Council Bluff, and renamed it Fort Atkinson. Originally, the fort was to be named "Fort Calhoun" in honor of the Secretary of War, John C. Calhoun, but its first commander was honored. During the 1820s, soldiers took meteorological observations as research for the government.
The garrison was involved in combat only in 1823. Members of the Arikara tribe attacked a trading post along the Missouri River in present-day South Dakota. Soldiers from the fort retaliated by attacking an Arikara village. Although no American soldiers died in the brief skirmish, seven soldiers drowned on the way upriver when their keelboat struck a log. They were counted as the first United States' casualties in the Indian Wars on the Great Plains.
In 1827, the Army abandoned the fort at Council Bluff and reassigned its personnel to other locations.
Read more about this topic: Fort Atkinson (Nebraska)
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