Bent's Fort Research Articles

Consuming a Settler Colonial History: Frontier Authenticity and the Collective Memory of the Fort

This paper explores the rhetoric of the Fort restaurant, located in Morrison, Colorado. The Fort conveys a rhetorical phenomenon I refer to as “frontier authenticity rhetoric” and embodies the rhetorical characteristics of a museum to (re)present a historical 1833 fur trading post, the Old Bent Fort. Using components of the frontier myth, authenticity, commodification, and Whiteness theory, I conduct an archival and spatial analysis of memory and material culture of the Fort’s rhetoric. I argue the Fort’s frontier authenticity rhetoric maintains collective memories of settler colonialism through origin seeking, essentialized frontier metaphors of an “ideal” American identity, and flawed senses of multicultural hospitality undercut by Whiteness.

Bound for Santa Fe: the road to New Mexico and the American conquest, 1806-1848

Bound far Santa Fg; TAe Road to New Mexico and American Conquest, 1806-1848. By Stephen G. Hyslop. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002. Pp. xiii, 514. Illustrations, map. Cloth, $34.95.)Despite its almost century-long existence, North American borderlands paradigm remains prominent in early American scholarship. Within last fifteen years, works by James F. Brooks (Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in Southwest Borderlands [2002]), and Daniel H. Usner, Jr. (Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley Before 1783 [1992]) have expanded cultural arid geographical venues of borderlands studies, while scholars such as Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron (From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and Peoples in Between in North American History, American Historical Review, 104 (June 1999), 814-41) have extended paradigm's theoretical boundaries. As a result, scope of borderlands research appears endless, and scholars who previously would have identified themselves as regional/local historians or specialists of the now must willingly or grudgingly consider conceptual framework in their interpretations. The uneven impact of these developments is vividly manifested in Bound for Santa Fe by Stephen G. Hyslop.Hyslop's work is centered on Santa Fe Trail, a loosely connected assemblage of pre-Columbian Indian hunting trails, dry riverbeds, community-maintained thoroughfares, and barely penetrable deserts that became a busy conduit for traders, adventurers, and soldiers traveling between St. Louis and Chihuahua during first quarter of nineteenth century. Through over four hundred pages of text, author methodically analyzes origins of trail, principal individuals arid groups key to defining and expanding pathway, and romantic contemporary literature that informed many Americans of its existence. He also provides chapters that concentrate on certain geographical stages of trail, such as Council Grove, Buffalo Country, and Bent's Fortdiverse settings that illustrate various environmental scenarios encountered by travelers. The concluding section of work deals primarily with U.S. conquest of trail, its major outposts during 184Os, and how this armed occupation transformed economic, social, and cultural lives of those who used highway and lived in its vicinity.According to Hyslop, one of goals in presenting this information is to explore trail's significance as an avenue of exchange in broadest sense (xii). Recent historiographical trends appear in author's approach to peoples involved with Santa Fe Trail. Mirroring interpretations by scholars such as Richard White (The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 [1991]) and Patricia Nelson Limerick (The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of American West [1987]), Hyslop emphasizes cross-cultural exchange and mutual accommodation between Indians, Mexicans, and Anglo-American settlers. Such interaction was conducted through exchanges that covered spectrum from thrusts arid parries of a romantic or spiritual nature to duels in marketplace to contests on field of battle (16-17). Eventual U.S. military and political domination belied Mexican and Native American agency in asserting cultural norms and integrating new settlers into traditional social networks. Santa Fe and Bent's Fort resembled other notable locales such as Taerisa and pays d'en haut in terms of their function as meeting grounds devoid of a centralizing dominant power. …

Ritual Ground: Bent's Old Fort, World Formation, and the Annexation of the Southwest

Ritual Ground: Bents Old Fort, World Formation, and the Annexation of the Southwest. By Douglas C. Comer. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996. Pp. xiii + 329, photographs, drawings, maps, notes, index. $45.00 cloth) Headquarters of the Southern Rockies fur trade and southern plains Indian trade and itself a major presence in the Santa Fe trade, Bent's Fort has surprisingly received little scholarly attention from students of the West since the 1954 publication of David Lavender's historical narrative, Bent's Fort. Now, Douglas C. Comer, an archaeologist with the U. S. National Park Service, revisits the site in Ritual Ground: Bents Old Fort, World Formation, and the Annexation of the Southwest. Drawing on philosophical, historical, anthropological, and archaeological sources, Comer seeks to demonstrate the fort's role in forming a common ground upon which Mexican, Anglo-American, and Indian interacted and constructed social relationships through the mechanism of ritual. Rituals of exchange, feasting, gaming, and the calcified ritual of the architecture of the fort itself sustained, Comer argues, this new world until the end of the fur trade and the aftermath of the Mexican-American War led to its collapse. Ironically, Comer implicates the fort itself, as an outpost of the culture of modernity, in its own demise, swept aside as a world order, led by an expansionist United States, established itself over the Southwest and ritual interaction among its peoples at this site disappeared. The first three chapters of Comer's work establish the theoretical foundations for the discussion to follow: ritual as the primary means of cultural creation, ritual's fugitive existence in the culture of modernity, and ritual behavior and its meaning. Subsequent chapters in turn examine the ritual meanings assigned to trade goods, the ritual significance of the fort's architecture, and the webs of kinship that intertwined the trade's participants. Finally, in an epilogue, Comer casts a contemporary eye on the modern ritual enacted at the reconstructed Bent's Old Fort National Historic Site. With its clear interdisciplinary focus, Ritual Ground stands as a work with a seemingly wide appeal. Its discussions of cultural geography, material culture, and ritual, for example, invite the attention of folklorists, anthropologists, and archaeologists, whereas its focus on Native American, Anglo, and Mexican interactions at one particular site attracts the scrutiny of ethnohistorians and social anthropologists. Moreover, its philosophical pretensions-evoking Nietzche, Eliade, Geertz, Foucault, and Gramsci among others-are in themselves provocative. …

Inside My Illustrated Travel Journals

Journal Article Inside My Illustrated Travel Journals Get access Carrie F. Arnold Carrie F. Arnold a long-time member of the Western History Association lives in Denver with her husband, Sam Arnold. Her artwork is in many private collections and has appeared on the covers of several books, including David Lavender's Bent's Fort and Sam Arnold's Eating Up the Santa Fe Trail. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Western Historical Quarterly, Volume 26, Issue 4, Winter 1995, Pages 506–516, https://doi.org/10.2307/970851 Published: 01 November 1995

Study of the Current and Historic Natural Resources of the Fort Union Trading Post National Historic Site

Fort Union Trading Post was one of the largest and most important fur posts on the Upper Missouri, described by Hiram Chittenden as "... the best built post on the Missouri, and with the possible exception of Bent's fort on the Arkansas, the best in the entire West" (1954:2:959). Fort Union was an important focal point for the Assiniboine, Cree, and Crow tribes who came there to trade, receive their annuities, and learn about White activities. The financial success of the post depended upon the hunt]ng and trapping efforts of these Indians who brought in bison robes and other animal pelts to trade for White-make goods. Thus, the success of the post was directly related to the natural resources of the area. Our research describes these resources-- the mammals, reptiles, birds, insects and plants--both at the present time (1979) and historically.

The Adventures of Alexander Barclay, Mountain Man: From London Corsetier to Pioneer Farmer in Canada, Bookkeeper in St. Louis, Superintendent of Bent's Fort, Fur Trader and Mountain Man in Colorado and New Mexico, Builder of Barclay's Fort on the Santa Fe Trail, New Mexico in 1848: A Narrative of His Career, 1810 to 1855, His Memorandum Diary, 1845 to 1850

The Adventures of Alexander Barclay, Mountain Man: From London Corsetier to Pioneer Farmer in Canada, Bookkeeper in St. Louis, Superintendent of Bent's Fort, Fur Trader and Mountain Man in Colorado and New Mexico, Builder of Barclay's Fort on the Santa Fe Trail, New Mexico in 1848: A Narrative of His Career, 1810 to 1855, His Memorandum Diary, 1845 to 1850

Bent's Fort

Journal Article Bent's Fort. By David Lavender. (Garden City: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1954. 450 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $5.50.) Get access Merrill J. Mattes Merrill J. Mattes National Park Service Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 42, Issue 2, September 1955, Pages 322–323, https://doi.org/10.2307/1897656 Published: 01 September 1955

Review: Bent's Fort, by David Lavender

Review: <i>Bent's Fort</i>, by David Lavender