When Beaver Skins Were Money 
III.—Amusements of the Traders — Kit Carson s Fights 
with the Indians — The Passing of 
the Old Fort 
By GEORGE BIRD GRINNELL 
chiefs by the quartermaster of the troops under 
I N its best days Bent’s Fort did a business 
surpassed in volume by only one company 
in the United States—John Jacob Astor’s 
great American Fur Company. As already stated, 
besides Bent’s Fort the Bent partners had a post 
on the South Platte at the mouth of St. Vrain’s 
Fork, and one on the Canadian River called the 
Adobe Fort for trade w.th tribes of Indians hos¬ 
tile to the Cheyennes—trade which Colonel Bent, 
of course, wished to hold. 
St. Vrain’s Fork runs into the South Platte 
from the north and went a few miles south or 
southwest of Greeley, Colo. 
The site of this fort, known later and now 
as Adobe Walls, was the scene of two hard 
battles between white men and Indians. The 
first of these took place in 1864, and was fought 
between the Kiowas, Apaches and Comanches 
with a few Cheyennes and Arapahoes, who were 
present chiefly as onlookers, and a detachment 
of troops under the command of Kit Carson, 
who then bore a commission in the United States 
Army. Carson had with him a number of Ute 
scouts. The fight was a severe one and Carson, 
after burning one of the Kiowa villages, was 
obliged to retreat. At that fight the Indians 
fought bravely and one of them possessed a 
cavalry bugle and knew the various calls. Car- 
son and his officers generally acknowledged that 
they were beaten by the Indians, and Carson 
finally withdrew, the Indians saving most of 
their property, though they lost a number of 
men. Among the Kiowas killed was a young 
man who wore a coat of mail. 
At this fight a spring wagon was found in the 
possession of the Indians, and its presence in this 
Indian camp has often been w'ondered at. At 
that time wagons were never used by Indians, 
whose only vehicle was the travois, which con¬ 
sisted of two long poles tied together over the 
horses’ withers, and dragging on the ground be¬ 
hind. Across these poles, behind the horses’ 
hocks, was lashed a platform, on which a con¬ 
siderable burden might be transported. 
The late Robert M. Peck, of Los Angeles, Cal., 
who was a soldier, serving under Major Sedg¬ 
wick, then in command of troops along the Ar¬ 
kansas, not long before his death told the story 
of an ambulance presented to one of the Kiowa 
Major Sedgwick, which may have been this one. 
Mr. Peck said: 
“That was before the Kiowa war broke out 
in 1859. To' hau sen was always friendly to the 
whites, and tried to keep the Kiowas peaceable. 
A small party of them, his immediate follow¬ 
ing, kept out of that war. These were mostly 
the old warriors, but the younger men, who con¬ 
stituted a majority of the tribe, went on the war 
path after Lieut. George D. Bayard, of our regi¬ 
ment, killed one of the Kiowas’ chiefs, ca.led 
Pawnee, near Peacock’s ranch on Walnut Creek. 
“That summer (1859) we had been camping 
along the Arkansas River, moving camp occas¬ 
ionally up or down the river, trying to keep 
Satank and his turbulent followers from begin¬ 
ning another outbreak. Old To' hau sen used 
frequently to come to our camp. Lieut. Mc¬ 
Intyre wanted to get rid of this old ambulance 
which he had long had on his hands and which 
in some of its parts was nearly worn out. After 
inducing Major Sedgwick to. have it condemned 
as unfit for service, Lieut. McIntyre had his 
blacksmith fix it up a little and presented it to 
the old chief. McIntyre fitted a couple of sets 
of old harness to a pair of To' hau sen’s ponies 
and had some of the soldiers break the animals 
to work in the ambulance. But when To'hau sen 
tried to drive the team, he could not learn to 
handle the lines. He took the reins off the har¬ 
ness and had a couple of' Indian boys ride the 
horses, and they generally went at a gallop. The 
old chief seemed very proud of his ambulance.” 
The second battle of the Adobe Walls took 
place in June, 1874, when the Kiowas, Coman¬ 
ches and Cheyennes made an attack on some 
buffalo hunters who had built themselves houses 
in the shelter of the Adobe Walls. The attack 
on the buffalo hunters was made in the endeavor 
to drive these hide hunters out of the buffalo 
country in order to save the buffalo for them¬ 
selves. The hunters finally drove off the In¬ 
dians with much loss, but soon afterward aban¬ 
doned their camp. One of these buffalo hunters 
is now or was recently a resident of Dodge City, 
Kansas. 
St. Vrain’s Fort and the Adobe Fort were 
abandoned between 1840 and 1850, when the fur 
business began to decline. By this time the 
beaver had begun to get scarce, having been 
pretty thoroughly trapped out of many of the 
mountain streams, and besides that the silk hat 
had been invented and was rapidly taking the 
place of the old beaver hat, and the demand for 
beaver skins was greatly reduced. Now, the 
mountains were full of idle trappers and a 
colony of these settled five miles above Bent’s 
Fort on the site of the present city of Pueblo, 
Colorado, where they did a little farming and 
a great deal of smuggling of liquor from Mexico 
to the plains country. The stagnation in the 
beaver trade, of course, affected the business of 
Win. Bent, who, since the death of his brother 
•Charles, seems to have carried on the trade 
alone. At this time its chief business was in 
buffalo robes and in horses. The establishment 
at the fort was now reduced, and in the early 
fifties Bent tried to sell it to the Government 
for a military post, but failing to receive what 
he considered a fair price for his property, in 
1852 he laid large charges of gunpowder in the 
buildings and blew the old fort into the air. 
In the winter of 1852-53 he had two log trad¬ 
ing houses among the Cheyennes on the Big 
Timbers, and in the autumn of 1853 he began to 
build his new fort of stone on the north side 
of the Arkansas River about thirty-eight, miles 
below old Fort William, and finished it the same 
year. This was the winter camp of the Chey¬ 
ennes. At that time the Big Timbers extended 
up the river beyond the fort and within three 
miles of the mouth of Purgatoire River, blit by 
1865 practically all of the timber had been cut 
down, leaving the fort in the midst of a tree¬ 
less prairie. 
In 1858 gold was discovered in the country 
northwest of the new fort. There was a rush 
of gold seekers to the country the following year, 
and for some reason Wm. Bent decided to lease 
his post to the War Department. This he did. 
A garrison was sent there. It was at first in¬ 
tended to call the new fort, Fort Fauntleroy, 
after the colonel of the old Second Dragoons, but 
finally the place was re-christened Fort Wise, in 
honor of the Governor of Virginia. The fol¬ 
lowing summer, i860, the troops built a stockade 
half a mile above Bent’s old stone buildings. 
When the Civil War began in 1861 and Gover¬ 
nor Wise joined the Confederates, the post was 
again renamed; this time Fort Lyon, in honor 
of General Lyon, who had been killed not long 
before at Wilson’s Creek, Mo. In 1866 the river 
threatened to carry away the post and it was 
moved twenty miles up the river. 
Meanwhile Wm. Bent had built a new stockade 
on the north side of the river in the valley of 
Purgatoire Creek and lived here, continuing to 
trade with the Indians. Kit Carson lived on the 
same side of the river and not far from the 
Bent stockade. Carson died at Fort Lyon, May 
