Fort Laramie Park History, 1834-1977

One of the most memorable shrines in Western America is to be found in Eastern Wyoming, at the junction of the Laramie and North Platte Rivers. Here preserved as a National Historic Site are the restored remains of Old Fort Laramie, 1834-1890. Perhaps no other place equals its star role in the long epic of frontier history. Few others equal it as a vivid reminder of a heroic past.

Serving successively as log stockade, adobe trading post, and evolving military post, Fort Laramie was a classic setting for the colorful pageant of the West. Explorers, trappers, traders, missionaries, emigrants, freighters, Pony Express riders, stage drivers, cowboys, and homesteaders, as well as soldiers and Indians, all perceived Fort Laramie — whether camp-ground, way-station, provision point, fortification, or temporary home — as a unique island of civilization in the Big Sky wilderness, where the Great Plains merge with the Rocky Mountains.

The key to Fort Laramie's importance was its strategic location on the great central continental migration corridor via the Platte and North Platte Rivers to South Pass. By tradition this is most commonly known as the Oregon Trail.