As fortune-seekers continued to flock towards the gold and silver mining camps of San Juan Mountains, word reached the Colorado Territory that its non-voting congressional representative was petitioning to shift one of its U.S. Army outposts to the west.

“Hon. (Thomas) M. Patterson, our delegate in congress … has been making an effort to have the old post at Fort Garland, in the San Luis Valley abandoned, and the troops moved further up towards the San Juan,” reported the Pueblo Chieftain on May 18.

It wasn’t the first time Coloradans had questioned the necessity of the post, located on the valley’s eastern edge at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. When it had been built in 1858, it had been on the far edge of the frontier — the Pikes Peak Gold Rush hadn’t yet started, and a handful of Hispano towns nearby in the San Luis Valley were the only non-indigenous settlements within hundreds of miles.

But now Fort Garland had been overtaken by settlements further west, including Del Norte, Saguache and the San Juan boomtowns. In 1873, the federal government had pressured the Ute people into the Brunot Agreement, ceding another 3.7 million acres of reservation land on the Western Slope, and in the event of conflict between the Utes and white settlers in the area, cavalry detachments from the fort would have to sojourn a hundred miles or more from its walls.

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Visitors to Fort Garland tended to paint a dreary picture of life at the outpost, especially for the common soldier.

“It is not a fort which could resist a siege, not even an attack from a few mounted Indians,” wrote the author Helen Hunt Jackson in 1877. “A quieter, more peaceful, less military-looking spot than was Fort Garland during the time we spent there it would be hard to find.”

William Rideing, an author who’d accompanied a southwestern expedition as part of the government’s Wheeler Survey, wrote an account of his stop at the fort for the magazine Appletons’ Journal, which was reprinted in the Rocky Mountain News in May 1876. Rideing was unimpressed by the San Luis Valley’s “horribly unvaried desert of plain,” and even less impressed by the fort itself, with its adobe-brick buildings “in a state of increasing and unprepossessing dilapidation.”

“When we are well inside the walls of the fort, we are struck with immediate commiseration for all the unfortunate officers and men condemned to live in so desolate a place,” Rideing wrote.

“Desertions are frequent,” he added. “We cannot wonder at it, however much we may condemn it.”

As the nation’s centennial approached in 1876, one of the two units stationed at Fort Garland was Company D of the 9th Cavalry Regiment, one of several segregated Black regiments that made up what would later be known as “Buffalo Soldiers.”

Thousands of Black soldiers, some of them freedmen emancipated in the Civil War, served in these units on the Western frontier during the late 19th century.

Soldiers in Company D in 1876 included Sgt. Henry Johnson, a Virginia native and 12-year Army veteran who would later be awarded the Medal of Honor, and Caleb Benson, a new recruit who had joined up in South Carolina at just 14 years old, seven years under the legal enlistment age. The company remained at Fort Garland even as conflicts with Native American tribes in New Mexico and Arizona were stretching the Army thin across the Southwest.

“By the middle of 1876, the Ninth Regiment had only half the number of men for duty that it should have,” writes historian Nancy Williams. “The army unrealistically expected fewer than 200 Buffalo Soldiers to control several thousand Utes in Colorado.”

The 9th Cavalry would remain stationed at Fort Garland as it participated in military campaigns against the Utes in the ensuing years, culminating in the forced expulsion of most Ute bands to Utah beginning in 1880. Despite periodic calls for the site’s abandonment, Fort Garland would remain occupied by the Army until 1883.

Conflict in the Dakotas

While life was mostly dull and monotonous for the soldiers stationed at Fort Garland in 1876, one of the most famous episodes in U.S. military history was shaping up several hundred miles to the northeast.

Over the preceding two years, thousands of gold prospectors had flocked to the Black Hills in the Dakota Territory, trespassing on land considered sacred by the Lakota Sioux and other tribes, and reserved for them under the terms of an 1868 treaty. When the Lakota, under the leadership of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, had refused to negotiate the sale of more of their territory, a few hundred troops under Gen. George Crook had marched out of Fort Fetterman in Wyoming and fought the Battle of Powder River against Lakota and Cheyenne forces in March.

Now Crook prepared to march against the tribes in force. This time, he would be joined by reinforcements from the Dakota Territory’s Fort Abraham Lincoln — a column of nearly 1,000 troops led by Gen. Alfred Terry, including all twelve companies of the 7th Cavalry Regiment, a seasoned force under the command of Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer.

“General Terry’s Big Horn expedition, delayed by a heavy rain storm, moves out from Fort Lincoln tomorrow,” reported the Rocky Mountain News on May 17.

Selected sources

The Rocky Mountain News, May 17, 1876

Williams, Nancy. “Buffalo Soldiers on the Colorado Frontier” (2021)