The Territories of Fort Morgan

The land on which Fort Morgan is built belonged to the Spanish from about 1540

until 1700. During the 18th century, the area containing Fort Morgan vacillated between Spanish and French control. In 1803, the French, who had again regained control in 1800, sold a large area of land, containing Fort Morgan to the United States. This transaction is known as the Louisiana Purchase and the land containing Fort Morgan was in the District then Territory of Louisiana. By the middle of the century, northeastern Colorado would become part of the Missouri Territory and finally the lands along the South Platte River would be part of the Nebraska Territory.

Fort Morgan & the Sand Creek Massacre

On November 29, 1864, the 1st and 3rd Colorado Cavalry under the command of Colonel John Chivington attacked a peaceful Cheyenne village at Sand Creek (near Eads). Three of the companies involved in the massacre had recently been stationed in the Fort Morgan area: Companies C and H of the 1st Colorado Cavalry had recently been stationed at Camp Sanborn (near Orchard) and Company F of the 3rd Colorado Cavalry had recently been stationed at the Junction [site of Fort Morgan]. Raids along the South Platte River in the summer of 1864 led to this attack and the repercussions from the Massacre would have a tremendous impact on Fort Morgan.

Battle at Fremont's Orchard

On April 12, 1864, a company of about 20 soldiers from Companies C and H of the 1st Colorado Cavalry under the command of Second Lieutenant Clark Dunn based at Camp Sanborn (near Orchard, Colorado), set out to find a group Cheyenne who reportedly stole stock from a local rancher:

…Ripley, a ranchman, living on the Bijon [sic] creek, near camp Sanborn, came into camp and informed Captain Sanborn, commanding, that his stock had all been stolen by the Indians, requesting assistance to recover it. Captain Sanborn ordered Lieutenant Clark Dunn, with a detachment of troops, to pursue the Indians and recover the stock; but if possible, to avoid a collision with them. Upon approaching the Indians, Lieutenant Dunn dismounted, walked forward alone about fifty paces from his command, and requested the Indians to return the stock, which Mr. Ripley had recognized as his; but the Indians treated him with contempt, and commenced firing upon him, which resulted in four of the troops being wounded and about fifteen Indians being killed and wounded, Lieutenant Dunn narrowly escaping with his life….

The Indians recounted a different version of events:

[E]arly in April, fourteen young men, all Dog Soldiers, left the camp on Beaver Creek and started north to take part in the expedition against the Crows. Before they reached the South Platte they found four stray mules on the prairie and drove them along with them. That same night a white man came into their camp and claimed the mules. The Indians who had found them told him that he could have them if he would give them a present to pay them for their trouble. The man went away to a camp of soldiers nearby and told the officer that a party of hostile Indians had driven off his animals…. According to the statements of Indians who were of the party the troops charged on them without any warning. Four men were shot by the Indians, one of whom they supposed to be an officer. Of the Indians Bear Man, Wolf Coming Out, and Mad Wolf were wounded. The soldiers retreated and the Indians, thoroughly frightened, gave up their expedition to the north and returned to the camp on Beaver Creek. They took with them the head of the officer, which they had cut off, and his jacket, field-glasses, and watch.

The military accounts paint the Cheyenne as the aggressors and in the Cheyenne accounts, the military charged without warning. It is possible that that the fault lay on both sides, the battle resulting from a grave misunderstanding; the military attempting to take weapons away from the Cheyenne may have been misinterpreted as a hostile act and the Cheyenne responded accordingly to protect their own safety. The discrepancies also include the injuries. The Cheyennes reported wounding a soldier and cutting off his head. The military records report four wounded soldiers (two mortally) who were taken back to Camp Sanborn and does not mention a soldier killed on the battlefield.

The Battle at Fremont’s Orchard signaled the start of the war with the Cheyenne. Over the coming months, Indians raids along the South Platte River and the military response escalated, culminating in the Sand Creek Massacre.
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Sources:
Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, Massacre of Cheyenne Indians, 38th Congress, 2nd Session (Washington, 1865), p. 107.

Grinnell, George Bird, The Fighting Cheyennes (NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915), pp. 134-6.

A View of the Mountains

Diaries from travelers along the South Platte River Road in the 1860s almost invariably report a grand sight at or near the Junction [Fort Morgan] between Beaver and Bijou Creeks - the Rocky Mountains. After trekking mile upon mile through the same desert wondering if the journey would ever end, the weary traveler saw Long’s Peak and a glimmer of hope on the horizon – the beginning to the end of a journey.

Fort Wicked

One of the most colorful characters on the South Platte River Road was Holon Godfrey who ran a station along the Overland Trail in the 1860s. In 1861, the colorful Holon Godfrey and his wife Matilda opened a general store and rest stop for the travelers. Godfrey’s Ranch was on the south side of the river near the modern-day South Platte River Bridge on Highway 6. A historical marker is placed approximately three miles west of Merino, Colorado. Poet Bayard Taylor wrote of his impressions of Fort Wicked and how Godfrey got his sobriquet, “Old Wicked”:

…we halted at a singular station. A wall of adobes three feet thick and six in height, pierced with loop-holes for musketry, confronted us. The top was rudely machicolated, and over the main entrance was the inscription, “Fort Wicked.” Entering the fortress, we found a long adobe cabin, one part of which was occupied as a store, well stocked with groceries, canned provisions, and liquors. A bearded man, with a good-natured but determined air, asked us if we would stop for breakfast . It was Mr. Godfrey himself, the builder and defender of the fort, which is known all along the Platte as “Godfrey's Ranche.” Here, last fall, he, his wife, and “another man,” withstood a siege of two days by three hundred Indians, who finally retreated, after losing seventeen of their number. Mr. Godfrey boldly announces that he will never surrender. He is now well prepared, and the rumors of a new Indian war do not give him the least anxiety. He is “bad medicine” to the tribes of the Plains, who are as cowardly as they are cruel. The stable and corral are defended by similar intrenchments [sic].

The siege Taylor references took place in January of 1865. Indians attacked and burned nearly all other ranches from Julesburg to Fort Morgan. James Florant Meline wrote of his impressions of “Fort Wicked” including more details about the attack:

We camped this afternoon two miles beyond the American [Ranch], and, seeing another ranch on the road, went up to reconnoiter. A sign over the door informed me that it was

FORT WICKED,
KEPT BY W. GODFREY,
GROCERY STORE.

The dwelling and store are strongly fortified by a strong stone wall nearly six feet high, well provided with flared embrasures…. In passing the sod-wall corral on my return to camp, I noticed a deep, well-constructed ditch at each angle of the inclosure [sic], - say three feet in breadth and depth. Supposing it was for defense, I…wondered what on earth the ditch could be for. There was no water to fill it, and, even if there were, the sandy soil would soon drink it up. Then, again, it was too narrow to prevent an Indian, “or any other man,” from stepping across…. I asked [Godfrey] why this “castle moat” was finished only at the angles, and not completed around the entire wall….
“Why, sir,” said he, “that’s a contrivance of my own to prevent cattle rubbing agin’ the corners, and knocking out the sod!”…
This ranch was attacked by the Indians on the same day Morris and three other men were killed at the American [Ranch]. The savages were about one hundred and thirty in number, Sioux and Cheyennes. They began operations at 10 a.m. by killing and driving off the valuable stock…then fired the prairie grass, the wind setting strong on the stable and hay-stacks…. Godfrey crept out with a bucket of water in one hand and rifle in the other, and, protected partially from [the Indian’s] view by the curtain of smoke, wet the grass a sufficient breadth to prevent the fire from crossing…. They then – all of them mounted, armed, and in their fiercest war-paint – made a circle about the house, and employed some hours in charging up to it in bands of twenty and discharging their pieces, guns and pistols, at long range, at the doors and windows. They kept up this performance until late in the afternoon…. Godfrey had but three men to assist him. He has seven now, and is not afraid, he says, of five hundred of them….

The siege and the successful defense of the ranch became something of a legend and Holon Godfrey became something of a folk hero.
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Photo Source: Worcester, Donald Emmet, Pioneer Trails West (Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers, 1985), p. 277.

Sources:
Taylor, Bayard, Colorado: A Summer Trip (NY: Putnam, 1867), p. 170.

Meline, James Florant, Two Thousand Miles on Horseback (NY: Hurd and Houghton, 1867), p. 42-44.

Travels by Stage

In the 1860s, emigrants traveled west to the gold fields of Colorado in all manner of conveyances, but those traveling by the Overland Mail stages were treated to as much comfort as was possible, paying between $75 and $175 plus meals to Denver. Author, Fitz Hugh Ludlow described the Concord coach he took from Atkinson, Kansas to Denver through the Fort Morgan area:

The Overland Mail vehicle is of that description known as the Concord wagon, - a stout oblong box on springs, painted red, with heavy wheels and axles, having a flat arched roof of water-proof cloth erected on strong posts, like those of a rockaway, and to this are attached curtains of the same fabric, which in bad weather may be let down and buttoned so tight as to make the sides practically as proof against storms as the top. In fine weather, when the curtains are up, no airier arrangement or more unobstructed view could be desired. The seats of the wagon are three, the passengers at the end sitting vis-à-vis; those in the middle looking forward, with their backs against a strap hooked to the side-posts, as in the old-fashioned stage-coach. Six persons can ride comfortably inside, if they are only used to sleeping in an upright position; but the great pressure of travel to Denver often at that day compelled passengers to ride three on a seat…

Poet and journalist Bayard Taylor also wrote of his journey from Denver eastwards along the Cut-Off through Fort Morgan in the relative “comfort” of an Overland coach:

ON Monday morning last, Mr. Beard and I took our seats in the overland coach, at Denver. Our hopes of a comfortable trip were blasted at the outset: there were seven passengers for Fort Kearney, and four for the “Junction,” [Fort Morgan] as it is called, on the Platte. The fare of one hundred and twenty-five dollars which one pays the Holladay Company, is simply for transportation: it includes neither space nor convenience, much less comfort. The coaches are built on the presumption that the American people are lean and of diminutive stature — a mistake at which we should wonder the more, were it not that many of our railroad companies suffer under the same delusion. With a fiery sky overhead, clouds of fine dust rising from beneath, and a prospect of buffalo-gnats and mosquitoes awaiting us, we turned our faces toward “America” in no very cheerful mood. The adieus to kind friends were spoken, the mail-bags and way-bill were delivered to the coachman, the whip cracked as a sign that our journey of six hundred miles had commenced, and our six horses soon whirled us past the last house of Denver….
Toward evening the clouds lifted for an hour or two, and we took our last look at the Mountains, lying dark and low on the horizon. The passengers for the Junction were pleasant fellows, and I mean no disrespect in saying that their room was better than their company. After sunset another setting in of rain drove them upon us, and by eleven at night (when we reached their destination) we were all so cramped and benumbed, that I found myself wondering which of the legs under my eyes were going to get out of the coach. I took it for granted that the nearest pair that remained belonged to myself…. The coach is so ingeniously constructed that there are no corners to receive one's head. There is, it is true, an illusive semblance of a corner; if you trust yourself to it, you are likely to lean out with your arm on the hind wheel. Nodding, shifting of tortured joints, and an occasional groan, made up the night. There was no moon, and nothing was visible except the dark circle of the Plains against the sky.

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Sources:
Ludlow, Fitz Hugh, The Heart of the Continent (NY: Hurd & Coughton, 1870), p. 10.

Taylor, Bayard, Colorado: A Summer Trip (NY: Putnam, 1867), p. 170.

Attacks on the Trail

Louis L. Simonin wrote a series of letters about his trip west in 1867. From Denver, he wrote of traveling through the Fort Morgan area, but he ends his letter from Julesburg with a dark joke:

[from Julesburg] …We have one portion of our journey yet to make, my companions and I, a stretch of 190 miles across the great desert. We have with us an escort of six soldiers, perched on our vehicle, from where they survey the terrain. I shall write you from Denver if we arrive safe and sound, or if we are scalped en route by the Cheyennes and Arapahos, whose territory we cross, and have to buy a wig to adorn our occiput....

[from Denver] Fortune favors the bold. Here we are, having arrived without any unpleasant encounters during the trials of the journey.... We left Julesburg on the evening of the second, and entered Denver yesterday toward midnight. Thirty hours by coach.... Shall I give you a description of the vehicle which brought us here.... Imagine a kind of Louis XIV coach... Within are nine seats, all priced alike: three in front, three behind, three in the middle. Ladies have the right to the front seats... Little baggage is carried, the least possible, sometimes none at all.... On top of the coach we carried only the well-armed soldiers, on the watch, which is worth more than baggage. The coach is drawn by six horses, driven

four-in-hand at full gallop across the prairie, level as a petrified sea.... All along the route are written the ineffaceable proofs of the battle of white against the Redskin. Everywhere pothouses and farms are burned.... One day, as our coach was crossing these solitudes, a naked man, perched on a rise of land, made signs to the driver. He, thinking he was dealing with an Indian, whipped up his horses. One of the travelers observed that he could well be a white. We paused for a moment, and the man came running and out of breath. He had just been captured by the Indians, who had stripped him of his clothing and given it to their women.... With their customary cruelty toward the palefaces, they prepared to submit their prisoner slowly, coldly, to all the tortures which they could imagine. They would pluck out his eyes, his nails, his tongue; they would cut off a foot or a hand; they would peel off a bit of flesh; they would tear off his skin; and finally, as a climax, they would bind the prisoner on the ground and light a fire on his abdomen, dancing an infernal circle around him. Our poor captive was about to undergo one by one all of this kind of torture when he managed to escape. The coach was passing at this moment and rescued him at the opportune time.... Would you not suppose you were hearing a romance or reaching a page of Cooper or Irving? Well, all this happened yesterday....

As our coach moved rapidly over the flat and dusty route amid the prairies...all these stories which were told me fixed themselves in my memory.... I must not speak more of our soldiers, whom we left one by one at the forts scattered along our route as we drew farther from the points of greatest danger. We have crossed the great American desert. Little by little prairie has given way to fields of sand where the red ants have heaped up enormous piles of siliceous gravel, their own pyramids of Egypt. Here and there the prairie reappeared; some flowers whose brilliance was now faded still shone amid the yellowed grasses.... We encountered no hostile Indians....

Simonin’s party had no problems with Indians, but it is clear from his description of what might have happened to the rescued traveler that the emigrants traveled in fear.
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Photo Source: Overland Stage. In Frank Root’s The overland stage to California, 1901, p. 10

Source: Simonin, Louis L. & Wilson O. Clough, Rocky Mountain West in 1867, (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), pp 25-31.

Artist on the Plains

Even during the height of the Indian Wars, emigrants along the South Platte River Road sometimes traveled hundreds of miles without having problems with the natives. The western artist Charles Stewart Stobie traveled along the South Platte River trail in the summer of 1865, though he must have passed the burnt out remnants of stage stations, he wrote instead about leisurely pursuits than the destruction along the trail. The following excerpt from Stobie’s journal begins just as his party left Julesburg:

Life on the Trail

The diaries written by the female travelers along the South Platte River Road in the 1860s show a different perspective on both the Indians and life on the trail. Helen E. Clark and seven others left Plano, Illinois in April following her father and brother who had made the trip to Denver a year earlier taking the Santa Fé or Southern route. Helen mentions passing O Follers [O’Fallen] Bluffs on June 2nd and Fremont’s Orchard on June 14th. The following excerpt from her diary begins between these two landmarks likely around the area of Sterling:

Tribes of Northeastern Colorado

Native Americans lived and hunted near Fort Morgan long before the first whites explored the area, but the tribes were migratory, moving with the seasons, or at the whim of the government or a hostile tribe. The first reported tribes in the Fort Morgan area were the Apache and the Padouca in the 16th and 17th centuries. Early in the 18th century, the Comanche and the Pawnee controlled eastern Colorado with the Kiowa taking over by the end of the century. By the 19th century, the Sioux, Arapaho and Cheyenne were the predominant tribes in the area.

In the early 19th century, Fort Morgan was part of the Indian Territory, created in 1825 for the protection of various tribes, but by the middle of the 19th century, as more emigrants moved west and land became more valuable, the Indian Territory was compressed . The Laramie Treaty (or Fitzpatrick’s Treaty) of 1851 gave the lands surrounding the South Platte River to the Cheyenne and Arapaho, but the river wandered through prime hunting ground and within the decade would also become a major highway to the Colorado gold fields making it a center of conflict.

At first, the Indians generally avoided or traded amicably with the whites, but the influx of emigrants threatened the Indians’ way of life. The settlers hunted or chased away most of the buffalo and chopped down the already scarce trees for firewood. The settlers also brought with them diseases for which the Native Americans had no immunity; Small Pox in particular ravaged many tribes.

In 1865, an attempt was made to move the Cheyenne and Arapaho off the land granted them in 1851, but the whites had little understanding of tribal politics. Many of the plains tribes had a long history with their neighbors, sometimes allies and other times bitter enemies. Black Kettle, a Cheyenne chief, summed up the problem:

"Yesterday you spoke of a reservation north of the North Platte, or south of the Arkansas. North of the North Platte has once been given to the Sioux to my knowledge; south of the Arkansas has been given to the Comanches and Kiowas. To place them [Cheyenne] on the same ground would be to make prisoners of us, or like going out of one fire into another."

The whites only understood that the Indian stood in the way of progress.
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Photo source: U. S. and Texas map 1839. Source: www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/histus.html Fort Morgan lies just below the "D" in "Indian"

Sources:
Hoxie, Frederick E., Encyclopedia of North American Indians (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1996), p. 453.

Monahan, Doris, Destination, Denver City: The South Platte Trail‎ (Athens, OH: Swallow Press, 1985), p. 14.

Hatch, Thom, Black Kettle: The Cheyenne Chief who Sought Peace but Found War, (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2004), p. 72-73.

Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for the Year 1865, (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1865), p. 524.

Route to Gold

An estimated 100,000 people swarmed to the Rocky Mountains in the spring of 1859 in what became known as the “great stampede” or the Colorado Goldrush. One major route to the Rocky Mountains lay through what is now Fort Morgan. At Fort Morgan, travelers chose between two routes: continue to follow the South Platte River west or take the shorter “cut-off” route overland to Denver. In May of 1860, Colonel William Hawkins Hedges and his party decided to take the “cut-off” route and realized why more travelers didn’t elect this route to Denver:

“…We saw a great many Indians and passed a great many villages, some large ones. At first they were Sioux and then Cheyennes, the Arapaho Indians occupying the territory immediately east from the mountains. Of the three tribes, the Sioux were much the most numerous; but all three tribes had been friendly for generations and their language was very similar. The end of that week, Sunday 27th, found us camped on the south bank of the South Platte, a little east of Beaver Creek, and about five hundred miles from Nebraska city…. At this point we began to meet some returning pilgrims, with tales of disaster and impending attack from the Indians; the latter rumor did not disturb us because the presence in all the Indian villages of the usual number of squaws and papooses was a sign of no immediate trouble….

Tuesday night, the 29th, we camped on the bank of the Platte where the new trail called “The Cut Off” leaves the round-about river trail and strikes straight across to Denver. We understood that as our teams were in such good condition it was possible for us to go through in two good days travel. The only real trouble was said to be the very poor water and a great scarcity of it. But it was finally decided to take “The Cut Off” trail, although it was also said to be a very sandy heavy track. So Wednesday morning, May 30th, after having filled every keg, canteen, or other utensil in which a little of the Platte River water could be carried, we left the river behind us and hit the new trail for Denver. That night we camped near a stage station where we could get water for the teams. Thursday we traveled on through a region apparently made up of sand, cactus, and Prairie Dog towns, and at night camped on Kiowa Creek, a little very brackish water along in pools. Friday morning we drank the last of the Platte River water and hit the trail early, expecting to be in Denver before night. The next water was said to be a little shallow pond of surface water about half way between Kiowa Creek and Denver. It proved to be a very hot day and before noon we began to suffer for water. About noon we came to the place where the pond had been, but there was no water, just a small area of damp soft mud, all tracked up by the feet of men and of animals, wild and domestic. We tried digging for water but got none. Gave the teams some grain but they ate very little. We ate what we could of some cold corn bread and raw side meat, then started on. At sundown with Denver still at an unknown distance, we stopped to rest and feed the teams, but they would not eat; neither could we. Things began to look very serious much of the trail was very sandy, and the loads cut deep and dragged heavily. Fortunately the moon was at the full, sailing high in a cloudless sky, and as night came on the air got cooler. We started on again, hoping as we came to the top of each roll in the prairie, to see the lights of Denver below us. I shall never forget the hours that followed as we toiled on in the moonlight, with frequent stops to rest the exhausted teams, and then with whip and voice urging them to drag along the heavy loads. My thirst was also becoming unbearable – torturing. At last, somewhere near midnight as we came up on a little rise of ground and stopped for a moment, our mules cocked their ears forward and began to he-haw – he-haw most vigorously. I think that was one of the sweetest strains of music that I ever heard, for it told us that the mules smelt water ahead. We had no more trouble urging them forward. A mile or so farther and from a little rise in the prairie, we looked down on a host of twinkling lights that said Denver lay before us .”


Hedges made the mountains, but by September of 1860 he was ready to return to Iowa. He was busted.
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Photo source: Hoig, Stan & Frank W. Porter, The Cheyenne, (NY: Chelsea House, 1989), p. 57.

Source:
Hedges, William Hawkins, Pike's Peak ... or Busted!: Frontier Reminiscences (Evanston, IL: Branding Iron Press, 1954), pp. 19-21.

Bijeau of Bijou Creek

In the early 19th century, various fur trapping companies set up posts along the front range of the Rocky Mountains in what is now Colorado. Trappers working for these companies went out into the wilderness, including the lands along the South Platte River, to trap beaver and buffalo sending the prized pelts back east. The trappers left little written evidence of their travels, but a few were known to have traveled along the South Platte River and likely through the Fort Morgan area including: William H. Ashley, Jim Beckwourth , John Gantt, Andrew Sublette and Kit Carson . But one trapper is of particular interest as a major landmark in the Fort Morgan area still bears his name.

Bijou Creek...

Introducing Fort Morgan, Colorado

Fort Morgan, Colorado lies on I-76, 80 miles east of Denver in the northeast corner of the state. Thousands of travelers pass through, stopping for gas or sustenance, heading for the ski resorts or campgrounds of the mountains or adventures further west. And this has been Fort Morgan for hundreds of years, a place of rest and respite, on a journey elsewhere. Settlers moving west in the nineteenth century passed through this junction camping, hunting buffalo, grazing their horses on the grass along the South Platte River. For a road has always been here, a natural road used by Indian tribes on their journeys and it was used by the early explorers of the New World even before a country was formed.

To the casual traveler, the corner of northeastern Colorado looks very much like the flat plains of Nebraska; an empty place, devoid of landmarks, the land stretching out west with a maddening sameness, where a century ago a lone tree served as a landmark. It is a harsh land, where man and animal could die of thirst just miles from the river and the heat of summer or the cold of winter could snap a man. This was not a land of interesting rock formations or refreshing lakes, it was a desert prairie. Landmarks are few and far between along the South Platte River Road, but just at Fort Morgan, there is truly important landmark. At this point, observant travelers of today, just as the travelers of a century past, look west on a clear day and gain their first glimpse of the Rocky Mountains rising from the desert, the distant peaks glistening with snow. After trekking mile upon mile through the same desert, the weary traveler sees a glimmer of hope on the horizon – the beginning to the end of a journey:

"…towards night, the clouds which had been lowering around the western horizon cleared away, and discovered to us a beautiful bird’s eye view of the Rocky mountains. This sight was hailed with joy.... We saw the end of the march – the long-wished-for object of all our hopes. They at first resembled white conical clouds lying along the edge of the horizon. The rays of a setting sun upon their snow-clad summits gave to them a beautiful and splendid appearance."

The above quote is from a 1835 report submitted by Colonel Henry Dodge describing the progress of his company of soldiers across the plains. The view has changed little in the 165 years since Dodge’s expedition, the mountains still rise from the horizon, teasing the senses; the traveler questioning whether the sight is snowy peaks or cloud formations and much of the land.

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Painting of Long's Peak 1820 by Samuel Seymour, the painter on Stephen H. Long’s expedition west. Source: Longs Peak: The Story of Colorado's Favorite Fourteener. p. 40.

Source: Henry Dodge, “Dragoon Expedition – Indian Talks,” The Military and Naval Magazine of the United States, 6, 5, 1836, p. 325.