Fort Dodge-Camp Supply Military Road

The road's outposts left their names on Clark County. The Bear Creek Redoubt, an earthen work about 50 feet square raised in fall 1870 near present Ashland to protect the mail and other shipments, has been on the National Register of Historic Places since March 30, 1978. A settlement took the name Soldiers Graves after two soldiers were killed by a Kiowa warrior in 1870, and was later called Bear Creek after one of the redoubts. Cattle followed the soldiers: between 1876 and 1885 nearly 2 million head passed through the county on their way to market.

What the plaque says

Fort Dodge-Camp Supply Military Road The Fort Dodge-Camp Supply Military Road passed several hundred feet west of this marker. The route was established in 1868 during General Philip H. Sheridan's winter campaign against Indians in Texas and the Indian Territory. This ungraded prairie trail, approximately 90 miles long, was important for transporting supplies from Fort Dodge and Dodge City to Camp (later Fort) Supply, in present Oklahoma, and was an important link in the communications system of western outposts. In the 1880s, a government telegraph line was erected along the route of the trail. In Clark County, two 50-foot square fortifications (redoubts) were built to house cavalry patrols assigned to keep the mail and supply route open. In the 1870s and 1880s, the military road served as a branch of the Western trail over which cattle were driven from Texas to Dodge City and beyond. The present road between Bloom and Ashland follows the route of the Fort Dodge-Camp Supply Military Road. Erected by Kansas Historical Society and Department of Transportation

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Boot Hill Museum — 20 mi
  Dodge City's museum on the site of the original Boot Hill cemetery, a 1950s replica of Front Street built around a collection one family began gathering in the 1870s.
• Fromme-Birney Round Barn — 21 mi
  A sixteen-sided horse barn of 1912 on the wheat country south of Mullinville, built for 28 draft horses and a French Percheron stallion and outdated by a tractor four years later.
• Pioneer-Krier Museum — 22 mi
  Clark County's museum on US-160 in Ashland, where a ranch county's household goods share a wing with the aerobatic biplanes of Harold Krier and the records of miler Wes Santee.
• Santa Fe Trail Ruts west of Dodge City — 27 mi
  Two miles of wagon swales up to 400 feet wide on a grass hillside above the Arkansas, nine miles west of Dodge City, a National Historic Landmark seen from a pull-off on US-50.

More markers nearby

• Fort Dodge — 17 mi
• Big Basin — 18 mi
• The Road to Santa Fe — 20 mi
• Dodge City: Cowboy Capital — 20 mi