Fort Atkinson

The first army post west of the Missouri, and it lasted eight years

Fort Atkinson stands on a high bluff above the Missouri River just east of present-day Fort Calhoun, Nebraska, the first United States Army post west of the Missouri, in the unorganised country of the Louisiana Purchase.

The bluff had been chosen fifteen years earlier. On 30 July 1804 the Lewis and Clark expedition camped here and named it Council Bluff, and on 3 August they held council with the Oto and Missouria, the first formal meeting between representatives of the United States and the western tribes. Clark judged the spot handsomely elevated and well calculated for a fort to command the country and the river, and recommended it.

In 1819 President James Monroe sent the Yellowstone Expedition up the Missouri under Colonel Henry Atkinson to plant a chain of forts that would support the American fur trade and counter British influence on the northern plains. The 6th Infantry and the 1st Rifle Regiment reached Council Bluff on 19 September and built a winter camp, Cantonment Missouri, on the river bottom. The winter of 1819–20 was brutal. Contractors failed to deliver supplies, and scurvy killed more than 200 of the 1,120 men; the civilians, of whom no record was kept, may have lost twice as many. In spring the Missouri flooded the camp, and the soldiers built a permanent post on top of the bluff, named for their commander. The plans for forts further upstream were abandoned.

For the next seven years Fort Atkinson was a frontier town of more than 1,000 people, with a brickyard, a lime kiln, a quarry, a grist mill, a sawmill and a cooper's shop; the Nebraska Legislature has called it the state's first town, and it held Nebraska's first school and library. Its soldiers kept weather records for the government, and expeditions set out from it for the fur country and for Taos and Santa Fe. They fought only once, in 1823, when troops went upriver to punish the Arikara villages after an attack on William H. Ashley's trading party; seven soldiers drowned when their keelboat struck a log, counted as the first United States casualties of the Indian Wars on the Great Plains.

The Army abandoned the fort in 1827, mostly for Fort Leavenworth. Mormons wintering at Cutler's Park in 1846 lived partly on old provisions they found there, and by the 1850s little was left. Archaeologists of the Nebraska State Historical Society located the buildings in the 1950s, it became a National Historic Landmark in 1961, and the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission rebuilt the fort in the 1980s and 1990s as a state historical park with a military museum and living history days.