September 10-11, Fort Robinson State Park, NE


We left Keystone Sunday morning and enjoyed our drive through southwestern South Dakota.  The country here is beautiful with hills and lots of hay fields.  We are staying a week at Fort Robinson State Park just outside of Crawford, NE.  This is a beautiful park, and we have a great site with a shade tree and grass.  After getting set up we relaxed and looked through our area information to plan our week.

 



Fort Robinson State Park is located in the Pine Ridge and at 22,000 acres it is the largest state park in Nebraska.  In March 1874, the US Government authorized the establishment of a military camp at the Red Cloud Indian Agency on the White River.  The camp was named Camp Robinson in honor of Lt. Levi H. Robinson, who had been killed the previous month.  In May, the camp was relocated to this site, and in January 1876, was officially designated Fort Robinson. Through the years Fort Robinson was the site of the Cheyenne breakout; the nations largest quartermaster remount depot; a field artillery testing station; an Olympic equestrian training center; the last great gathering place of the Sioux Nation; a military dog training center; a WW II prisoner of war camp; and an agriculture research station before becoming a state park in 1956.

Fort Robinson played an important role in the Indian wars from 1876 to 1890.  Crazy Horse and 889 of his followers surrendered at Red Cloud Agency on May 6, 1877.  On Sep. 3, General George Crook ordered Crazy Horse arrested and he surrendered on Sept. 5th.  The plan was to take him to Fort Laramie that night but during a scuffle inside the guardhouse Crazy Horse fled out the door and received a fatal bayonet wound. This is a reconstruction of the guardhouse where Crazy Horse was held.  The stone monument reads “On this spot Crazy Horse, Ogallala Chief, was killed Sept. 5, 1877.”




                         Reconstruction of original barracks.






Historic buildings, once serving as housing for the soldiers and officers have been converted into overnight guest lodging.

Rex and Tacky resting in front of an Officers Quarters Duplex.





                   Post Headquarters constructed in 1905.






More barracks built in early 1900s.

This is a beautiful park to walk around, and we have shown a very small part of it.  There are two parade grounds, a veterinary hospital, horse stables and a swimming pool among many other buildings.  There are also 60 miles of hiking trails, 20 miles of mountain biking trails, and 20 miles of horse-riding trails.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

June 4-6, 2009

Image
June 4, 2009 We drove Northwest of Jasper along the Yellowhead Highway to Mount Robson Provincial Park. We saw a moose along the river in the distance but wasn’t close enough to get a picture. We saw Yellowhead Lake and Moose Lake, and had a picnic lunch at the Mt. Robson Visitors Center. The scenery is spectacular – a picture of Mt. Robson. Our site at Whistler campground. June 5 We left Jasper in the sunshine and warm but the further North we got, the colder, rainier and more grey it got. As we turned north on route 40 to Grand Paririe, we started to hit a little snow. Didn’t last long but really woke us up. It stayed rainy and grey until we got to Grand Cache then it started to clear. We also got our first real windshield chip today, but a trip to WalMart and a windshield repair kit later we were fixed. The land here is somewhat hilly, swampy and covered with trees. There are some really big oil and gas complexes and some large lumber mills such as the one we saw in Grand Paririe.
Read more

August 24-26, 2009

Image
We headed towards Flathead Lake Monday morning and stopped in Kalispell to get our air conditioner repaired. It had stopped working a couple of weeks ago and August is not the time to be without an air conditioner. The RV dealer we stopped at gave us the name of the guy who does their air conditioning work. He was able to fix the air conditioner (a switch had burned out) in a couple of hours and we were on our way. We drove to Polson, MT at the south end of Flathead Lake and are going to stay here for a few days. We are staying at Eagle Nest RV, which has a cherry orchard on one side, a golf course on one side and a horse pasture on another side. It is a really nice park with lots of grass and trees. Unfortunately, we are at the end of the cherry season and we might not be able to find any fresh cherries. Tuesday morning we decided to take a drive around Flathead Lake. This is a very scenic area with lots of fruit orchards. We found a fruit stand and bought cherries, peaches, tomatoes
Read more

July 28, 2009

Image
We left Valdez this morning in rain and fog and retraced our route back up the Richardson Highway. We ran out of the fog and rain after we went over Thompson Pass and thought we would be able to see more of the scenery. Not to be, shortly we ran into more smoke. We stopped at the visitor center at Wrangell-St. Elias National Park but it was really smoky so we didn’t stay very long. The ranger there (we think he was a ranger but he looked about 15 years old!) told us that there are currently 60 fires in Alaska and the smoke here is from the fires North of here around Fairbanks. Wrangell-St. Elias National Park is the largest national park in the US at 13.2 million acres. There are only 2 short gravel roads in the park so access is limited to backpacking, hiking and flight seeing. The park is mainly wilderness and has 4 major mountain ranges in it and includes 9 of the 16 highest peaks in the US. Unfortunately, because of the smoke we were not able to see any of them. We turned off the R
Read more