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.

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.