Bent's Old Fort National Historic Site

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Bent's Old Fort National Historic Site
IUCN Category V (Protected Landscape/Seascape)

Location:	Otero County, Colorado, USA
Nearest city:	La Junta, Colorado
Coordinates:	38°02′34″N, 103°25′45″W
Area:	799 acres (3.23 km²)
Established:	June 3, 1960
Total Visitation:	27,760 (in 2005)
Governing body:	National Park Service

Bent's Fort

Bent's Old Fort is a National Historic Site in Otero County, Colorado. William and Charles Bent, along with Ceran St. Vrain, built the original fort on this site in 1833 to trade with Plains Indians and trappers. The adobe fort quickly became the center of the Bent, St. Vrain Company's expanding trade empire that included Fort St. Vrain to the north and Fort Adobe to the south, along with company stores in Mexico at Taos and Santa Fe. The primary trade was with the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians for buffalo robes.

For much of its 16-year history, the fort was the only major permanent white settlement on the Santa Fe Trail between Missouri and the Mexican settlements. The fort provided explorers, adventurers, and the U.S. Army a place to get needed supplies, wagon repairs, livestock, good food, water and company, rest and protection in this vast "Great American Desert". During the Mexican-American War in 1846, the fort became a staging area for Colonel Stephen Watts Kearny's "Army of the West".

For much of the 20th century there have been two main opposing theories for the 1849 destruction of the Fort. In his book Colorado (1889), George Bancroft attributes the Fort's demise to an attack by local indigenous tribes; "Bent's fort was also captured subsequently and the inmates slaughtered". This theory has since been largely discounted. Historians now lean towards the explanation that William Bent himself attempted to sell the Fort to the U.S. Army and, when he failed to extract a sum he felt the sale warranted he mined the fort with gunpowder and explosive charges and "blew it to pieces" on August 21, 1849. Certainly eye-witnesses who saw the fort after its abandonment tend to describe damage and destruction as being greater than would have been the case had the Fort simply fallen prey to abandonment and neglect.

The area of the fort was designated a National Historic Site under the National Park Service on June 3, 1960 and a National Historic Landmark later that year on December 19. Archeological excavations and original sketches, paintings and diaries were used in the fort's reconstruction in 1976.