Until 1834 Americas vast buffalo plains were wild
and untouched by eastern society and business. All that changed when William Sublette
built the small, Fort William, on the Laramie and Platte Rivers of today’s Wyoming.
Society and eastern business came west and stationed itself behind the 18 foot
high stacked earth and cottonwood walls of the fort the trappers already called
Laramie.
Much of the fur trade in America’s northwest and
south were already controlled by far removed big business and now the great
free trappers and traders of the plains and Rocky Mountains had eastern
business in their midst.
White men had hunted and trapped this area for two
decades, living, dressing, eating and hunting like their nomad brothers of the
plains. Many married into the tribes, happy with the roaming freedom of the
plains Indians.
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| Over the Laramie River from the Fort |
With the building of Fort Laramie came a separation of
cultures. The walls of the fort kept the Indians out and let the white men in.
When allowed inside, Indians were treated more like intruders than guests, a
most opposite approach from the tribes who had welcomed whites into their world
a few years earlier.
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| Trapper and Trader at Fort Laramie |
In the year 1834 and the west was going through a
huge change, a change that would bring bloodshed to the plains for more than a
half century. The east had come west.
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