Fort Rice After General Sully's Expeditions

Fort Rice After General Sully's Expeditions. Fort Rice State Historic Site. In 1866-1868, Indian councils were held at the post. The most important of these was the Great Council with the Sioux bands in July 1886. A key leader of the Lakota, Thathanka Iyotake (Sitting Bull), refused to participate. Father Pierre Jean De Smet did convince Sitting Bull to allow his chief lieutenant, Phizi (Gall), to attend this council. As a result, Sioux bands signed the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, which ended the Red Cloud War and defined boundaries of the Great Sioux Reservation. The reservation included most of the area west of the Missouri River in present-day South Dakota.

Fort Rice was rebuilt in 1868 with more suitable materials and served another ten years of detachments. Between 1871 and 1873, Fort Rice served as the base for the three Yellowstone expeditions, which escorted parties surveying the route of the Northern Pacific Railroad. Four companies of the Fort Rice contingent of the 7th Calvary accompanied Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer on his Black Hills expedition in 1874. Two companies fought in the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Others like Mathews, Slaughter, and Fisk would become associated with the military post on the Missouri River.

Fort Rice was decommissioned on November 25, 1878, after the establishment of Fort Yates at the Standing Rock Agency. Building materials from the fort would become a part of a new fort constructed further north on the Missouri, Fort Abraham Lincoln, Dakota Territory. In 1913 the State of North Dakota acquired Fort Rice and in the 1940s the Works Progress Administration (WPA) marked the foundations of many of the buildings on site.

Photo captions: , Middle left: Sitting Bull, August 2, 1881 , Middle right: Chief Gall, ca 1882-1885 , Lower left: Linda Warfel Slaughter drew this sketch of Fort Rice as it appeared in 1871, when she lived at the post with her husband, Frank Slaughter, the Post Surgeon. Later, she settled in Bismarck and was an educator, historian, and women's rights advocate in North Dakota. , Lower right: The four military posts directed to be built by General Pope were in response to the political pressure exerted by the Governor of Dakota Territory, William Jayne, Governor of Minnesota, Alex Ramsey, and others after the Dakota War of 1862. Additional pressure was being exerted by the War Department to establish a safe route for emigrants to the gold fields of Montana, Idaho, and west.