K-9 Training Area

Nearly all of these dogs were someone's pets, loaned or given. Dogs for Defense, formed by civilians soon after Pearl Harbor, pushed the Army into the program, and about 18,000 donated dogs served by the war's end. The first shipment reached Fort Robinson on October 3, 1942. Each dog was tattooed with a serial number and vaccinated against rabies and distemper, and owners of dogs rejected after two weeks had ten days to collect them or the dogs were destroyed. Donors wrote asking after their animals; one eleven-year-old asked whether he could put a star in his window.

What the plaque says

K-9 Training Area In September 1942 the Fort Robinson War Dog Training Center was established. Barracks, class- rooms, administrative offices, and other support buildings were located west and north of here. To the east and north was a sprawling kennel area housing 1,800 dogs The dogs were trained as guard, scout, messenger, and sled dogs. Training normally lasted 8 to 12 weeks. Nearly 5,000 dogs, half the number used by the Army in World War II, were trained here. The center was deactivated in June 1946. Nebraska State Historical Society

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Robinson State Park — 0.3 mi
  The army post beside the Red Cloud Agency where Crazy Horse was bayoneted in 1877 and Morning Star's Northern Cheyenne broke out into the January cold of 1879.
• Toadstool Geologic Park — 14 mi
  A pocket of badlands in the Oglala National Grassland where sandstone caps balance on clay stems, ancient tracks cross the rock, and a trail leads on to a 10,000-year-old bison bone bed.
• Agate Fossil Beds National Monument — 22 mi
  A fossil quarry on the Niobrara that also keeps the gifts Red Cloud and other Lakota and Cheyenne visitors gave the ranching family who were their friends for thirty-five years.

More markers nearby

• Officers' Row, 1874-1875 — steps away
• Fort Robinson and the Railroad — 0.2 mi
• 1909 Brick Barracks — 0.2 mi
• Fort Robinson — 0.3 mi