Day 3 - Bent outta shape

Amarillo, TX to Salida, CO - 429 Miles
September 3, 2012

Nice morning drive from Amarillo to Bent's Fort on the Arkansas River.    This is the stuff, or, rather, the place for history.  Anyone and everyone headed west on the Santa Fe trail stopped at Bent's Fort.

Bent's Fort was the shortened name of the fort built by brothers William and Charles Bent, and Ceran St. Vrain in 1833.  It served as a trading post with the southern Cheyenne and Arapahoe Indians, and fur traders throughout the area.  As the only permanent settlement with any real security on the Santa Fe Trail it was a gathering point for Colonel Stephen Watts Kearny's 'Army of the West' on its way to California to claim that country for America during the Mexican war of 1846.  That latter effort turned into rather a dog's breakfast after he resupplied his troops with inferior animals in a mule trade in New Mexico, and then was defeated by about 150 Californio Lancers at the Battle of San Pasqual.  Kearney suffered a slight wound at this battle and, after Kit Carson escaped the encircling Californios and reached San Diego for help, he was relieved by Marines and naval personal sent by Commodore Stockton,

Any wishing to study the quintessential early American frontiersman, and American expansion into the west, would do well to study Kit Carson.  He was an amazing individual: hunter; trapper; scout, guiding John Charles Frémont's journeys of discovery in the far west.   (Carson scouted for all three of the famous expeditions.)  His national fame sourced from an account in Frémont's report of his second trip into the west.   Happening upon a Mexican man and boy who had survived an Indian attack in which two men were killed, two women staked to the ground and mutilated for two days, and thirty horses stolen, Carson was incensed and determined to help the two. With another mountain man, Alex Godey, Carson tracked the Indians for two days, attacked the camp killing two of the hostiles, and returned the horses to their owners.

Carson was a product of his times and does not warrant valuation or validation by modern views and mores.   During his third expedition with Frémont, the camp was sneak attacked at night by a local tribe with three of the American party killed, along with one native, thought to be a member of the Klamath tribe.  Frémont ordered an attack on a Klamath village which was, according to reports, totally destroyed with women and children included in the victims of the furious revenge.   Latter historians are in rather mutual agreement that they attacked the wrong village.  The real perpetrators are believed to be from the Medoc tribe.  During the civil war Carson led a group of local, mostly Mexican, militia and participated in the Battle of Valverde in 1862, the most westerly battle of the Civil War.  Later, incorporated into the Army, Carson led troops against the Navajo, Apaches, Kiowa, and Comanches with a significant success rate.  Perhaps his most notorious act (today) was the subjugation of the Navaho and their infamous transport to Bosque Redondo near present day Fort Sumner, the place of Billie the Kid's death.  What most do not realize was that Carson was following orders with which he did not agree, and that he later worked diligently to effect the Navajo's return to their present day homeland.  Amazingly, only able to write his name, he achieved the rank of brevet General in the U.S. Army, doubtlessly, the only illiterate so honored in the history of that institution.

I am not one of those who revere the "noble redman."  While I think there is much to admire and to study of their cultures, I think they were a civilization just like ours and, like ours, got their land through conquest.  The Sioux are thought to have come into America 30,000 years ago with their primary territory located in Minnesota.  They only began moving into the Dakotas in the 1700s...and at other tribes expense.  The very warlike Comanche drove the Apaches out of west Texas and into their New Mexico and Arizona homeland.    I fail to see any major difference between what they did and what was done to them by the white men.  And it only takes a brief study of the way the various tribes treated their enemies, as with white men later, to discover that the white man had no singular trait requiring universal condemnation.  It's always about somebody wants what somebody else has.  Winners write history.

Beautiful farmland with a couple of my recurring examples of the tenacity of life, living things successfully surviving in hostile environments.

The other side of the road.  Less pretty, but doubtlessly equally fertile.

Recreation of Bent's Fort

Bent abandoned the fort in 1849 whenever a cholera epidemic hit Indian tribes in the area.  In 1852 he returned and salvaged what he could burning the remainder.  This recreation, 1976, was based upon historical documents and descriptions.  However, since it wasn't the original, it held little interest for me.  Just a place for souvenir salesmen to separate the unwary from their money.  I took the picture and, as they say in this part of the country, "Lit a shuck."

Bent's Fort is located near La Junta, Colorado on US50, one of my favorite roads in America.

Leaving Bent's Fort I head west on US50 stopping in Salida, CO for the evening.