Explore the most important settlement in Colorado during the mid 1800s!

In 1846 the Army of the West used the fort as a jumping off point for the invasion of Mexico during the Mexican-American War. The army also used the fort as a supply depot and hospital.

 Rocky Mountain PBS's Colorado Experience: Bent's Fort

William J. Convery, Ph.D. State Historian, History Colorado

As the resident manager, William Bent oversaw all trade at the fort. He occupied these private quarters, but lived with his Cheyenne family in their village as well. His quarters reflected the varied cultures that influenced his world.

Susan Magoffin wrote, “more customers than any other room, they have a well inside and fine water it is – especially with ice.”

Rocky Mountain PBS's Colorado Experience: Bent's Fort

Blacksmith shops were noisy, cluttered hubs of activity in trading posts like Bent’s Fort. American and French mechanics sweated over heaving bellows and huge anvils as they manufactured wagon parts and tools, made shoes for livestock, and fixed wheels.  

One of the first Anglo women to travel the Santa Fe Trail, Magoffin spent her stay at the fort recuperating in the doctor’s quarters after taking ill and suffering a miscarriage.

The council room was a neutral ground for Indian peace councils as well as a place where terms of trade were agreed upon.

A working relationship with plains Indian tribes was so important to the success of the fort that Cheyenne Chief Yellow Wolf helped choose the location of the fort, thirty miles above Big Timbers. The Cheyenne and Arapaho, as well as many other Indian tribes, used the fort to trade buffalo hides for manufactured goods.

Typical smells here would have been burning wood, spices, grease drippings, and the rank odor of spoiled meat and rotting food. Several cooks were employed at the fort but the most famous was William Bent’s slave, Charlotte Green, who was well known for her pumpkin pies and flapjacks.

Repairing wagons was essential to the success of Bent’s Fort. Wagons were repaired and animals shod in the alley behind the shop.

At ease among the American, Mexican, and native cultures that met and mixed on the high plains and Rocky Mountains, the traders and trappers that frequented Bent’s Fort—James Baker, “Uncle Dick” Wootton, and Kit Carson, to name a few—were well known throughout the West in their own time, and in ours.

Also known as the “general store," served many different people: trappers, traders, Indians, the fort’s labor force, travelers, soldiers, and various adventurers. The trade room was stocked with calico, blankets, muskets, gun powder, flint, knives, clay pipes, kettles, coffee, chocolate, corn, and other goods from around the world.

In 1849, William Bent packed up his goods and abandoned the fort. After the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848, a number of catastrophes hit the region all at once. The arrival of US troops disrupted the fort's trading system, while a cholera epidemic killed many neighboring Plains Indian people. The buffalo robe trade, which flourished after the beaver trade collapsed ten years earlier, began to die out.

In 1853, Bent established a new trading post in the Big Timbers area (near today's Las Animas, Colorado.) Six years later, the US army bought the post and renamed it Fort Wise. The age of the fur trade had ended.

Standards for Explore the Fort

College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework