Fort Hartsuff State Historical Park

The North Loup valley was a road before it was a settlement. Lakota war parties came down it toward the Pawnee villages on the Loup at Genoa, and when white settlers moved in from 1872 they found themselves on that road. After attacks at Sioux Creek in October 1873 and at Pebble Creek in January 1874, where a settler was killed, they asked for soldiers. General Edward O. C. Ord chose the site, and on September 5, 1874, the army established the Post on the North Fork of the Loup River, renamed in December for Major General George L. Hartsuff. It was meant to protect homesteaders and Pawnee alike. That October the Pawnee agreed to sell their reservation, and by October 1875 they had been moved to Indian Territory.

It was a grasshopper year, and settlers did much of the building; the wages, and the army's purchases of their crops, carried families through. The walls are a concrete of local lime, sand and gravel. In April 1876, at what was called the Battle of the Blow Out, Lieutenant Heyl's troops drove off a Lakota party and First Sergeant Dougherty was killed. By 1881 the railroad and a county government had reached the valley, and the army left on May 1 of that year.

Farmers used the buildings for decades. The state acquired the site in 1961, restored the concrete buildings and rebuilt the wooden shops, and Game and Parks calls it one of the most complete small prairie forts left.