Fort Wallace

One find from Fort Wallace outlasted the post. Early in 1867 the army surgeon Theophilus Hunt Turner, exploring the rocks with the scout William Comstock, found the bones of a large fossil reptile in a ravine of Pierre Shale about 14 miles northeast of the fort. In December 1867 some vertebrae reached Edward Drinker Cope. Cope's first reconstruction of Elasmosaurus put the skull at the end of the tail; Joseph Leidy pointed out the error in March 1870, and Othniel Charles Marsh's mockery of it fed the Bone Wars. A casting is on display at the Fort Wallace Museum.

What the plaque says

Fort Wallace First called Camp Pond Creek, Fort Wallace was established in 1865. The fort served as the headquarters for troops given the task of protecting travelers headed west along the Smoky Hill Trail to the Denver gold fields. Fort Wallace was the westernmost military outpost in Kansas, and from 1865 to 1878 served as one of the most active military posts in the Central Plains. Troops often spent time in the field, and the fort was several times attacked by Plains Indians striving to defend their lands and protect their way of life. The fort was located about two miles to the southeast of this marker. Abandoned in 1882, nothing is now visible of the stone and wood buildings where once over 300 men were stationed. Just north of where the fort once stood, the old post cemetery still exists, enclosed by stone walls within the Wallace Township Cemetery. In 1867 U.S. soldiers erected a monument as a tribute to their comrades who had been killed in action and buried there. Although the soldiers' remains were later moved to Fort Leavenworth National Cemetery, the monument still stands in their honor. Erected by Kansas State Historical Society & Kansas Department of Transportation

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Wallace Museum — steps away
  A museum complex on US-40 in Wallace gathered from across the county: the 1865 Pond Creek stage station, the Weskan depot and a Swedish colony's 1888 church.
• Mount Sunflower — 26 mi
  The highest ground in Kansas, 4,039 feet on the Harold family's ranch half a mile from Colorado, with a sunflower of railroad spikes, a mailbox register and an invitation to stop by the house.

More markers nearby

• Butterfield Stage Line — 21 mi