Fort Morgan, Colorado: Artist Thomas Worthington Whittredge at Fort Morgan

Saturday, December 9, 2017

Artist Thomas Worthington Whittredge at Fort Morgan

In 1866, General John Pope, commander of the Military Division of the Missouri which then included the Colorado Territory, set off on a tour of the Plains, the Rocky Mountains and New Mexico. During his trip he would stay at Fort Wardwell on June 22nd through the 24th. The expedition was recorded by Colonel James Meline in his book Two Thousand Miles on Horseback. Meline wrote eloquently about the fort (see post "In View of the Mountains").

Also accompanying General Pope on this expedition was the landscape painter Thomas Worthington Whittredge. He was as enthralled as Meline with the plains and a number of his landscapes are set along the Platte River.

Whittredge (1820-1910) was an American artist of the Hudson River Schoo. He would travel over the plains to the Rocky Mountains three times in all to paint, but he specifically recalled his first trip through Colorado and New Mexico with General Pope in his autobiography:

I had never seen the plains or anything like them. They impressed me deeply. I cared more for them than for the mountains, and very few of my western pictures have been produced from sketches made in the mountains, but rather from those made on the plains with the mountains in the distance. Whoever crossed the plains at that period, notwithstanding its herds of buffalo and flocks of antelope, its wild horses, deer and fleet rabbits, could hardly fail to be impressed with its vastness and silence and the appearance everywhere of an innocent, primitive existence.

There was the nomad and the rattlesnake to be taken into consideration, and they both occasionally made some noise.

We usually made a march of thirty-three miles a day, which was performed between daybreak and one o’clock in the afternoon. On arriving in camp I gave my horse to an orderly and went at once to the wagon for my sketch box which was usually covered deep with camp furniture, but I always got it out, and while the officers were lounging in their tents and awaiting their dinners, I went to make a sketch, seldom returning before sundown...

Whittredge painting Indian Encampment on the Platte

General Pope’s impressions of the fort are not recorded, but he must have been as impressed as his traveling companions. He immediately ordered that Fort Wardwell be renamed in honor of his friend Christopher A. Morgan who had died suddenly earlier in the year (see post Colonel Christopher A. Morgan). Fort Morgan was born.

View a number of Thomas Worthington Whittredge's paintings of the plains below.

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Sources:

James Florant Meline, Two Thousand Miles on Horseback (NY: Hurd and Houghton, 1867).
Thomas Worthington Whittredge, The Autobiography of Worthington Whittredge, 1820-1910 (New York: Arno Press, 1969).

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Historic Overview

From my youth I brought with me only a vague impression of the history of the small town in which I was raised. Fort Morgan, Colorado, built on the site of a short-lived military fort in the heart of the great American desert; a fort that had never been attacked, never seen a battle. On little more than a whim I went in search of the fort’s operational dates (1864-1868), expecting this information would come readily to hand and that would end my curiosity - the fort once again fading into the midst of vague memory. To my surprise, I instead found a door opening to the history of the west.

The history of Fort Morgan will never rival that of Denver or glisten with the same gold dust of the mountain mining towns, but this little town on the plains of Colorado was central to the story of the Romantic west; it's story connecting with the major events of the age. Everyone has a history and every place is central to a story. What follows is the story from the land - of the land - on which Fort Morgan would rise.