Fort Keogh

Within weeks of the Little Bighorn, Colonel Nelson Miles was sent to the mouth of the Tongue River with orders to build a post for the campaign that followed, and Congress established the military reservation on July 22, 1876. The first winter's camp was a cantonment by the river. The permanent fort went up a mile west, some sixty buildings set around an unusual diamond-shaped parade ground, and in November 1878 it was named for Captain Myles Keogh, one of Custer's officers killed on the Little Bighorn. Lakota and Cheyenne bands came in and surrendered here, and in October 1877 the Nez Perce prisoners from the Bears Paw were brought to the cantonment before being sent on down the Missouri. The traders' town that grew up just outside the reservation took Miles's name.

When the fighting was over the post found a second use. In 1909 Fort Keogh became a remount depot, the largest of the Army's three, buying and breaking horses in country that was already full of them, and it shipped thousands of them to the Army in the First World War. The Army gave up the land in 1922, the last soldiers left in February 1924, and that April the reservation went to the Department of Agriculture.

It is still a working station. The Fort Keogh Livestock and Range Research Laboratory runs cattle and grazing research on some 55,000 acres, and its Line 1 Hereford herd has been a mainstay of Hereford genetics. Of the old fort only a few buildings remain around the parade ground, with a historical marker on Fort Keogh Road, and one set of officers' quarters now stands at the Range Riders Museum in Miles City.