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Fort Smith

Travel Montana

Fort Smith Directory Listings

A view from 1939:

The RUINS OF FORT C. F. SMITH, (4,570 alt.), are on a bluff 500 yards from the Big Horn River. Fort Smith was established August 12, 1866, to protect Bozeman Trail travelers from the resentful Sioux. Its stockade, of logs and adobe, 125 yards square, was an impregnable haven; from its lookout tower riders three miles distant could be watched. The fort was manned by the 27th Infantry, whose colonel had irritated Secretary of War Stanton by continually asking for a transfer to some easy post. Stanton at length asked his clerk, "Which next to hell is the worst place to send a regiment?" The clerk replied, "To the Powder River country." Stanton sent the 27th Infantry to this place; events proved that the clerk had been right. From the beginning the fort was besieged by Red Cloud's Sioux. It was abandoned in 1868, after several bloody encounters, notably the Hayfield fight in which 11 soldiers and 8 civilians fought off 600 Sioux, sustaining only 4 losses, and the annihilation of Capt. William T. Fetterman's command of 82 men near Fort Phil Kearny, Wyo.; the fort site was included in land set aside as the Crow Reservation. The old tower has fallen in a heap and the wall is a mass of debris.

Midway between the ruins and the Big Horn River was the post's burial ground. In 1892 the remains of 17 soldiers and civilians were removed from this place to the Custer Battlefield National Cemetery.
The DE SMET TREE, an ancient cottonwood under which the priest in 1840 celebrated the first Christian mass in the Big Horn country, stands near the ruins. Two and one-half miles south, on Warrior Creek, is the site of the Hayfield fight.

Source: Montana: A State Guide Book; Compiled and Written by the Federal Writers' Project of the Work Projects Administration for the State of Montana; September, 1939.