Fort Washakie Historic District | |
Nearest city | Fort Washakie, Wyoming |
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Coordinates | 43°00′23″N108°52′56″W / 43.00639°N 108.88222°W Coordinates: 43°00′23″N108°52′56″W / 43.00639°N 108.88222°W |
Area | 23 acres (9.3 ha) |
Built | 1869 |
NRHP reference No. | 69000188 [1] |
Added to NRHP | April 16, 1969 |
Fort Washakie was a U.S. Army fort in what is now the U.S. state of Wyoming. The fort was established in 1869 and named Camp Augur after General Christopher C. Augur, commander of the Department of the Platte. [2] In 1870 the camp was renamed Camp Brown in honor of Captain Frederick H. Brown, who was killed in the Fetterman Massacre in 1866. [3]
It was renamed again in 1878 in honor of Chief Washakie of the Shoshone tribe, making the fort one of the only U.S. military outposts named after a Native American. (Another fort named for a Native American was Fort E.S. Parker, the original Crow Agency in Montana that operated from 1869 to 1875, which was named after the Seneca lawyer Eli Parker, who was a General under Ulysses Grant.)
Fort Washakie was operated as a military outpost until 1909, when it was decommissioned and turned over to the Shoshone Indian Agency. The graves of Washakie and Lewis and Clark Expedition guide Sacajawea are located on the grounds of the fort. The site is included within the present-day Wind River Indian Reservation.
Park County is a county in the U.S. state of Wyoming. As of the 2020 United States Census, the population was 29,624. The county seat is Cody.
Fremont County is a county in the U.S. state of Wyoming. As of the 2020 United States Census, the population was 39,234, making it the fifth-most populous county in Wyoming. Its county seat is Lander. The county was founded in 1884 and is named for John C. Frémont, a general, explorer, and politician. It is roughly the size of the state of Vermont.
Atlantic City is a census-designated place (CDP) in Fremont County, Wyoming, United States. The population was 37 at the 2010 census. The community is a small mining settlement in a gulch near South Pass in southwestern Wyoming. It was founded as a mining camp following the 1867 gold rush in the region. The town declined following the end of the placer gold rush in the early 1870s, but continued to exist as advances in mining technology allowed further extraction of gold. From the 1960s until 1983, it was the location of US Steel iron ore mine. The town is accessible by gravel roads from nearby Wyoming Highway 28.
Fort Washakie is a census-designated place (CDP) in Fremont County, Wyoming, United States, within the Wind River Indian Reservation and along U.S. Route 287. The population was 1,759 at the 2010 census. The headquarters for the Eastern Shoshone Tribe is located in Fort Washakie, as well as the Bureau of Indian Affairs agency for the Wind River Indian Reservation.
Lander is a city in Wyoming, United States, and the county seat of Fremont County. It is in central Wyoming, along the Middle Fork of the Popo Agie River, just south of the Wind River Indian Reservation. It is a tourism center with several nearby guest ranches. Its population was 7,487 at the 2010 census.
Fort Bridger was originally a 19th-century fur trading outpost established in 1842, on Blacks Fork of the Green River, in what is now Uinta County, Wyoming, United States. It became a vital resupply point for wagon trains on the Oregon Trail, California Trail, and Mormon Trail. The Army established a military post here in 1858 during the Utah War, until it was finally closed in 1890. A small town, Fort Bridger, Wyoming, remains near the fort and takes its name from it.
Washakie was a prominent leader of the Shoshone people during the mid-19th century. He was first mentioned in 1840 in the written record of the American fur trapper, Osborne Russell. In 1851, at the urging of trapper Jim Bridger, Washakie led a band of Shoshones to the council meetings of the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1851). Essentially from that time until his death, he was considered the head of the Eastern Shoshones by the representatives of the United States government. In 1979, he was inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners of the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.
Fort D. A. Russell, also known as Fort Francis E. Warren, Francis E. Warren Air Force Base and Fort David A. Russell, was a post and base of operations for the United States Army, and later the Air Force, located in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The fort had been established in 1867 to protect workers for the Union Pacific Railroad. It was named in honor of David Allen Russell, a Civil War general killed at the Battle of Opequon. In 1930, the fort's name was changed to Fort Francis E. Warren. In 1949, it became Francis E. Warren Air Force Base.
The Wind River Indian Reservation, in the west-central portion of the U.S. state of Wyoming, is shared by two Native American tribes, the Eastern Shoshone and the Northern Arapaho. Roughly 60 mi (97 km) east to west by 50 mi (80 km) north to south, the Indian reservation is located in the Wind River Basin, and includes portions of the Wind River Range, Owl Creek Mountains, and Absaroka Range.
Shoshone National Forest is the first federally protected National Forest in the United States and covers nearly 2,500,000 acres (1,000,000 ha) in the state of Wyoming. Originally a part of the Yellowstone Timberland Reserve, the forest is managed by the United States Forest Service and was created by an act of Congress and signed into law by U.S. President Benjamin Harrison in 1891. Shoshone National Forest is one of the first nationally protected land areas anywhere. Native Americans have lived in the region for at least 10,000 years, and when the region was first explored by European adventurers, forestlands were occupied by several different tribes. Never heavily settled or exploited, the forest has retained most of its wildness. Shoshone National Forest is a part of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, a nearly unbroken expanse of federally protected lands encompassing an estimated 20,000,000 acres (8,100,000 ha).
The Department of the Platte was a military administrative district established by the U.S. Army on March 5, 1866, with boundaries encompassing Iowa, Nebraska, Dakota Territory, Utah Territory and a small portion of Idaho. With headquarters in Omaha, the district commander oversaw the army's role initially along the Overland route to Salt Lake City, then later the construction route of the Union Pacific Railroad. The district also included the Montana road through eastern Wyoming. The district was discontinued when the Army's command was reorganized in 1898.
Sacagawea was a Lemhi Shoshone woman who, in her teens, helped the Lewis and Clark Expedition in achieving their chartered mission objectives by exploring the Louisiana Territory. Sacagawea traveled with the expedition thousands of miles from North Dakota to the Pacific Ocean, helping to establish cultural contacts with Native American people and contributing to the expedition's knowledge of natural history in different regions.
James Trosper is the current Eastern Shoshone Sun Dance chief. He is widely regarded as “a respected voice on traditional Plains Indian spirituality.” He is Director of the High Plains American Indian Research Institute. HPAIRI facilitates a wide variety of partnerships between the University of Wyoming and the tribes of the Wind River Indian Reservation in Fort Washakie, Wyoming “to work together in ways that empower tribes, nurture innovation for American Indian sustainability, and demonstrate respect for Native peoples’ cultures, traditions, laws, and diverse expressions of sovereignty.”
The Overland Trail was a stagecoach and wagon trail in the American West during the 19th century. While portions of the route had been used by explorers and trappers since the 1820s, the Overland Trail was most heavily used in the 1860s as a route alternative to the Oregon, California, and Mormon trails through central Wyoming. The Overland Trail was famously used by the Overland Stage Company owned by Ben Holladay to run mail and passengers to Salt Lake City, Utah, via stagecoaches in the early 1860s. Starting from Atchison, Kansas, the trail descended into Colorado before looping back up to southern Wyoming and rejoining the Oregon Trail at Fort Bridger. The stage line operated until 1869 when the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad eliminated the need for mail service via stagecoach.
Shoshone-Episcopal Mission is a historic mission and school in Fort Washakie, Wyoming. The school was built from 1889 to 1890 by Rev. John Roberts, the minister and teacher on the Wind River Indian Reservation. Roberts built the boarding school to teach the Shoshone girls living on the reservation; as many of the students lived up to 20 miles (32 km) away from the school, it was necessary to build a boarding school to teach them. The school later became the headquarters of the entire Episcopal mission on the reservation.
Sherman Coolidge, an Episcopal Church priest and educator, helped found and lead the Society of American Indians (1911–1923). That first national American Indian rights organization run by and for Native Americans pioneered twentieth-century Pan-Indianism, the philosophy and movement promoting unity among American Indians regardless of tribal affiliation.
St. Michael's Mission is an Episcopal church mission established about 1887 in Fremont County, Wyoming to minister to the Arapaho and Shoshone of the Wind River Indian Reservation. It was founded by Reverend John Roberts with the permission of Shoshone Chief Washakie. The community of Ethete grew around the mission, given its name by Washakie's assent in the Shoshone language, ethete. In 1900 a small log church was built about 3 miles (4.8 km) from the present location. In 1910 the mission received an endowment from Mrs. Baird Cooper and the new site was developed over the next seven years. In 1920 the original church was moved to the mission, enlarged, and named "The Church of Our Father's House.
T Cross Ranch is a dude ranch in Fremont County, Wyoming. The ranch is located at 7,800 feet (2,400 m) altitude in Shoshone National Forest, 15 miles (24 km) from Dubois and 2 miles (3.2 km) from the Washakie Wilderness. Apart from a cabin built by the site's original homesteader, the contributing buildings of the ranch date between 1916 and 1946. The ranch was established in 1918 by German immigrant Henry Seipt when he established his homestead and called it The Hermitage. Seipt and his family ran the ranch as a hunting and fishing camp until 1929, when it was sold to Robert and Helen Cox. The Coxes renamed it the T Cross Ranch and made it into a dude ranch. The new name was derived from the Tau Chapter of Saint Anthony's Society, to which Robert Cox had belonged at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and from the cross of St. Anthony. A total of 16 log buildings comprise the historic section of the ranch. The district also includes irrigation ditches dug during the 1920s and 1930s.
The sculptor David McGary has created a standing statue of Chief Washakie, leader of the Shoshone people, in multiple versions, as well as an equestrian statue of the same subject.
Friday (Arapaho: Teenokuhu or Warshinun, also known as Friday Fitzpatrick, was an Arapaho leader and interpreter in the mid to late 1800s. When he was around the age of eight, he was separated from his band and was taken in by a white trapper. During the next seven years, he was schooled in St. Louis, Missouri and went on trapping expeditions with his informally adopted father, Thomas Fitzpatrick. After he was recognized by his mother during an encounter with the Arapaho, he returned to the tribe.
Media related to Fort Washakie Historic District at Wikimedia Commons