Fort Klamath

In the summer of 1863 a company of the First Oregon Cavalry rode into the Wood River Valley, above the north end of Upper Klamath Lake, to build a post at the edge of Klamath country. Its stated job was guarding the emigrant road through southern Oregon. Its effect was to open the upper basin to white ranchers and farmers; Linkville, the town that became Klamath Falls, was not founded until almost four years later.

On October 15, 1864, at Council Grove near the fort, the government signed a treaty with the Klamath, the Modoc and the Yahooskin band of Northern Paiute. It took most of the basin, set aside the Klamath Reservation just south of the post, and put the three peoples, who had been rivals, on the same ground. The Modoc gave up their homeland along the Lost River and around Tule and Lower Klamath lakes. Many would not stay on land shared with the Klamath, and the army's attempt to force a band back from the Lost River in 1872 began the Modoc War. When it ended, the fort held the prisoners, six leaders in the guardhouse and more than a hundred and fifty Modoc men, women and children in a stockade. The four men executed here are buried in the meadow.

The post grew to dozens of buildings, a sawmill, a hotel and a theater among them, and then outlived its use. President Cleveland ordered it closed in 1886, and the last troops left in 1890. Nothing of the original fort stands. Klamath County acquired eight acres of the site in 1966, and a museum built in 2002 to the old guardhouse's design stands where the guardhouse did, with exhibits on the fort and the war. It is open in summer.