Fort Halleck Site 1867- 1886

The Army came here to guard the trail and the rails. Captain S.P. Smith established Camp Halleck on July 26, 1867, to protect the California Trail and the crews building the Central Pacific, naming it for General Henry Halleck. In 1868 it became headquarters of the Nevada Military District after Fort Churchill was abandoned. The post was raised to Fort Halleck in 1879—a two-company garrison that served less against local tribes than as a base for expeditions into Idaho, Oregon, and beyond. It was abandoned in 1886. Only the site and scattered traces remain below the Ruby Mountains.

What the plaque says

On July 26, 1867, Captain Samuel Smith established what became Fort Halleck twelve miles to the south near Soldier Creek. In concert with Fort Ruby fifty miles further south, the Army intended the Fort to protect the California Emigrant Trail, the Overland mail route and construction work on the Central Pacific Railroad during conflicts with Goshute and Western Shoshone in that decade. The camp was named for Major General Henry Wager Halleck, a prominent general who served as general-in-chief to the Army from 1862 to 1865. In May 1868, Camp Halleck became a two-company post and the headquarters for the Nevada Military District when Fort Churchill, near Yerington, was abandoned. By 1877, the Fort contained about 20 buildings of wood, adobe, and stone arranged around a rectangular parade ground. Troops from the Fort participated in action against the Modoc Indians in Northern California in 1873; against the Nez Perce uprising in Idaho in 1877; against the Bannocks in Oregon in 1878; and against the Apaches in Arizona in 1885. However, by the 1880s, the need for military stations throughout the American West was much diminished and the Army closed the Fort in December 1886.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Elko — 18 mi
  The railroad built it, cattle made it, and gold keeps it — the working capital of northeast Nevada, a frontier cow town that never got around to becoming a relic.
• Lamoille Canyon & the Ruby Mountains — 22 mi
  The great exception to Nevada's sagebrush monotony — a glacier-carved canyon and a wall of eleven-thousand-foot granite peaks an hour southeast of Elko, fairly called the state's Alps.
• California Trail Interpretive Center — 27 mi
  A free, surprisingly ambitious BLM museum of the overland crossing — eight miles west of Elko, on the trail itself, where the California Trail met the Hastings Cutoff that doomed the Donner Party.

More markers nearby

• Lamoille Valley — 16 mi
• Ruby Valley Pony Express Station — 17 mi
• Elko — 17 mi
• Elko Airport — 19 mi