The Fort Pierre-Fort Laramie Trail

Every robe in the plate's quarter million was a woman's work. Women in the camps did all the tanning, and Theodore Davis reckoned one robe took a woman one to two weeks, about ten days on average. Only cow and calf robes taken from November to March were worth trading, and John Sanford wrote around 1845 that a lodge seldom traded more than twenty skins a year. At the posts the robes were folded hair side in and pressed into packs of about ten, some eighty pounds, and in 1842 Pierre Chouteau Jr. and Company credited $2.70 a robe.

What the plaque says

The Fort Pierre- Fort Laramie Trail From about 1837 until 1850, more than a quarter million buffalo robes bought from Indians and 275 tons of fur company trade goods were hauled over the 300-mile-long Fort Pierre-Fort Laramie Trail that followed the White River through this area. First used by the American Fur Company, the trail had its origin as part of an earlier Spanish trade route from Santa Fe to the Missouri River in present South Dakota. During the 1840s the Fort Pierre-Fort Laramie Trail was the shortest overland connection between trading posts on the Platte and steamboats plying the Missouri. After the government purchased Fort Laramie in 1849, Col. Aeneas Mackay and Capt. Stewart Van Vliet with ten mounted riflemen traveled the trail to Fort Pierre. Gen. William S. Harney's troops marched over the route in 1855, and Lt. G. K. Warren of his staff mapped the trail. Small traders and government freighters continued to use portions of the trail until the 1880s. Ruts from the passage of thousands of carts and wagons can still be seen in several places between Fort Laramie and Fort Robinson. Dawes County Travel Board Nebraska State Historical Society, 2009

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Museum of the Fur Trade — 7.1 mi
  A museum of what traders and Native nations exchanged, from the oldest known point blanket to a Lakota leader's silver cross, beside the rebuilt Bordeaux trading post east of Chadron.
• Fort Robinson State Park — 23 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.

More markers nearby

• Fort Robinson-Camp Sheridan-Pine Ridge Indian Agency Road — 2.9 mi
• The First Church in Chadron — 3.4 mi
• Chadron State College — 3.5 mi
• The Chadron-Chicago Cowboy Race — 3.5 mi