Fort Vasquez

[exMember]

Buck, what can you tell me about this fort! I just recently heard about it and looked it up. I never knew about this fort.

 

[BigAl52]

Jon
I go by this Fort every time I go meet Ron C to go shooting. Its in the median on hwy 85 just south of Platteville. Its an 1800's fur trading fort along the Platte River. Ive never stopped there but they did update the place several years ago.

 

[Buck Conner1]

Louis Vasquez and Andrew Sublette operated the fur-trading post - Fort Vasquez from 1835 to 1842. After lots of competition and changing trade patterns caused the pair to leave the fort, it served as a landmark along the South Platte River Trail before gradually disappearing back into the plains to the East. The interest in the Rocky Mountain fur trade revived in the early twentieth century, leading to a full-scale reconstruction of the fort in the 1930s. The rebuilt fort now serves as one of History Colorado’s regional museums.

<h2 class="post-content">Rocky Mountain Fur Trade</h2>The fur trade in North America started with the early colonists in the seventeenth century and spread quickly through the Great Lakes region. By the early 1800s, various companies were competing to control the fur trade along the upper Missouri River and in Oregon. The trade expanded to the plains and the central Rocky Mountains in the 1820s. In 1822 William Ashley and Andrew Henry organized the Rocky Mountain Fur Company to tap this trade, eventually employing or buying furs from mountain men such as Jim Bridger and Kit Carson.

When Ashley and Henry started the Rocky Mountain Fur Company in St. Louis, they placed an advertisement calling for 100 young men to travel up the Missouri River as trappers and traders. One of the young men who responded was twenty-three-year-old Pierre “Louis” Vasquez(1798–1868). A St. Louis native, Vasquez was the son of a Spanish father and a French-Canadian mother. He spoke English, French, and Spanish fluently. His older brother had served as an interpreter in Zebulon Pike's ill-fated 1806–07 expedition up the Arkansas River and returned to tell Louis stories of the mountains on the far side of the plains. Louis Vasquez saw the Rocky Mountain Fur Company ad and jumped at the chance to see the mountains for himself.

Vasquez happened to participate in the period of the fur trade that has become legendary—the brief years when mountain men, Native Americans, traders, and St. Louis agents gathered for an annual trading rendezvous, where they bartered furs for goods, restocked supplies, drank whiskey, and told stories. By the early 1830s, Vasquez had a reputation among the men of the fur trade as “Old Vaskiss,” an experienced mountain man trusted with the Rocky Mountain Fur Company’s most difficult and important tasks.

When Vasquez had first come west with the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, he was joined by five brothers named Sublette. The youngest of the brothers, Andrew, entered the fur trade in 1830, when he was twenty-two. Andrew Sublette was a great marksman, and he quickly made a name for himself. In 1834 he entered into a business partnership with Vasquez. The two seasoned mountain men planned to pursue the trade in buffalo robes with Cheyenne and Arapaho Native Americans along the South Platte River.

<h2 class="post-content">Four Forts on the South Platte</h2>In the 1830s, established trading posts put an end to the old fur-trading practice of the annual rendezvous. In 1833 Bent, St. Vrain, & Co. built Bent's Fort on the Arkansas River, which became an important trading post on the Santa Fe Trail between Missouri and New Mexico. The post was essentially a wholesaler of buffalo hides, buying cleaned and prepared hides from nearby bands of Cheyenne and Arapaho and selling the hides in St. Louis.

When Vasquez and Sublette began their partnership in the middle of the decade, they decided to start their own trading post on the South Platte River. Their fort would be roughly halfway between Fort William (now known as Fort Laramie) on the North Platte River and Bent’s Fort on the Arkansas River. With a location on the South Platte, Vasquez and Sublette hoped to carve out trading territory previously claimed by Bent, St. Vrain, & Co.

Fort Vasquez was built in 1835 on the east bank of the South Platte. Vasquez and Sublette hired Mexican workers to construct an adobe structure about 100 feet on each side, with walls 2 feet thick. Vasquez served as the bourgeois (or “booshway”) of the fort, responsible for daily operations and the bottom line. The fort had up to twenty-two traders as well as other workers to cook, herd, hunt, and perform repairs.

Fort Vasquez operated without competition for only a few months. Lancaster Lupton established Fort Lupton in 1836, and Peter Sarpy and Henry Fraeb secured financing to build Fort Jackson in 1837. In addition, the powerful Bent, St. Vrain, & Co. sent Marcellin St. Vrain, Ceran St. Vrain’s younger brother, to gain a foothold in the South Platte trade with Fort St. Vrain. By 1837 there were four trading posts engaged in cutthroat competition on a short stretch of the South Platte.

There was not enough trade to sustain four forts for long. In addition, Bent, St. Vrain, & Co. was a relative behemoth, with enough money and power to squash its upstart competitors, and the nature of the trade was changing yet again as new wagon routes such as the Oregon Trail took shape. In 1840 Vasquez and Sublette took only 700 buffalo robes to St. Louis, while Bent, St. Vrain, & Co. hauled 15,000. Bent, St. Vrain, & Co. bought Fort Jackson from its backers in 1838. Vasquez and Sublette sold Fort Vasquez to other traders for $800 in 1842; later that year it was reported as abandoned. Lupton abandoned his fort in 1844, leaving Fort St. Vrain the only one of the four forts still in operation.

Fort Vasquez lasted seven years as a trading post on the South Platte. The two men who bought it from Vasquez and Sublette fared poorly in business, lost horse and mule herds to Indians, and abandoned the fort without paying for it. Vasquez, meanwhile, moved with the trade. He entered into a partnership with Jim Bridger at Fort Bridger, a trading post on the Oregon Trail in southwestern Wyoming, where he stayed until 1855.


Interest in the four decaying forts on the South Platte revived in the early twentieth century, as they shifted from usable structures to historic sites that were celebrated and preserved. In 1911 the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution erected a monument at the site of Fort St. Vrain. Soon, other monuments followed at Fort Lupton and Fort Vasquez. When LeRoy R. Hafen became state historian in 1924, his work on the Rocky Mountain fur trade helped focus renewed historical and cultural interest on legendary mountain men like Jim Bridger and Louis Vasquez as well as on old trading posts like Fort Vasquez.

After the Fort Vasquez site was deeded to Weld County in 1934, the Platteville Community Club led an effort to rebuild the fort and make it into a museum. The project got started when the town of Platteville secured more than $2,800 in funding from the Works Progress Administration. The new fort was not an exact replica of the original. Little archaeological work had been done before the reconstruction began. Local workers moved the walls a few yards farther away from US 85 and introduced some architectural elements and structures not found in the original fort. The new Fort Vasquez was dedicated in August 1937, in a ceremony attended by a crowd of 2,000 people.

A widening project on US 85 endangered Fort Vasquez in the 1950s, but local and historical groups spoke up to save the reconstructed fort. The road was rerouted to run on either side of the fort, isolating the fort on a large island in the highway median. It shares the space between the two halves of the highway with a weigh station located on the southern tip of the fort’s island.

In 1958 the Colorado Historical Society (now History Colorado) assumed ownership of Fort Vasquez, with plans to turn it into a regional museum. The society also conducted archaeological work on the old fort from 1963 to 1970. The excavations revealed the fort’s original location, which was within steps of the reconstruction, as well as the foundations of numerous rooms, entrances, fireplaces, and other architectural features.

Colorado History​

The Fort Vasquez Museum opened in 1964, a small group of us attended this opening. 

The grounds now include a life-size bison sculpture by a local artist as well as a Cheyenne tipi, which would have been a common sight at the fort during its original trading days.

Check it out Jon, stop by and look BigAl.

 

[Hilljack1]

Buck

Very nice piece of information....You are a scholar...

Hilljack

 

[Buck Conner1]

What has always interested me about this time period is how the successful players like Louis Vasquez, the Bent brothers, Sublette, Astor, Bridger, St. Vrain, Lupton and a few others would go down in one venture and then popped up on top in the next one. Was this a learning experience on their part of what worked and what didn't? John Jacob Astor was a very smart man he owned and ran Fort Union in the Dakotas before moving on to Ft. Astor on the west coast (big time fur trader).

We were invited to a rendezvous after we had made a canoe run for the United States Postal Service for their 100th year (filmed us delivering the mail in period clothing and canoes to Pony Express riders). Didn't really fit the different time periods, but that's what they wanted, money is money .... 

After that we went to Fort Union, to enjoy their event (we were honored guests). While there we got to go into their archives to see all the items discovered when the original fort site was cleared to build a new old fort. 

After seeing a thousand different items from trade goods to pieces of guns we had dinner on the U.S. Parks Service and got to listen to a gentleman tell us how this fort got to be in modern times. 

The original fort site had been homesteaded in the 1860's by a family, in the 1970's the family wanted to sell this historic piece of ground with most of their holdings on one side of a road and this section on the other side. The U.S. Parks Service was contacted about the sale, like most government purchases they had to go through a million steps to scratch their butt. In the meantime a smart employee contacted the Astor Family in NY City (the wealthy ones that own much of 5th Avenue). Whoever they talked to wasn't even aware of where their family fortune came from (thinking real estate not fur trade). They were not interested in such a lowly operation. Next was call a family member in London, he's like the fourth great grandson. His "man" passed the word on to this young man who was very interested and made arrangements to meet at the site. 

The U.S. Parks Service folks were in shock that Mr. Astor would come to look at the ground. It ended up that our government damn near lost this site by dragging their feet and a young man from another country visits the ground, buys the ground and pays to have the fort rebuilt. Our government folks are shocked and then this gentleman signs over the ownership to the U.S. Parks Service, free and clear. 

Mr. Astor has visited this location several times since this making his g.g.g. grandfather smile I would think.  :Red tup:   :ttups: