Home / Nebraska / The Sandhills / Fort Niobrara National Wildlife Refuge
Pine-covered slopes and open grassland fall away toward the Niobrara valley from an overlook at Fort Niobrara National Wildlife Refuge.Sandra Uecker, USFWS / public domain via Wikimedia Commons
🌲Natural

Fort Niobrara National Wildlife Refuge

Part ofThe Sandhills
On this driveNE-12: The Outlaw Trail, Valentine to Ponca

An army post built in 1880 to watch the Sicangu Lakota at Rosebud, turned in 1912 into a refuge where bison and elk graze above the Niobrara east of Valentine.

⏱
Duration
Two to three hours.
🎟
Admission
Free. A $1 fee applies to launching tubes, kayaks or canoes at the Fort Niobrara launch site.
📅
Best Season
Late spring through fall; the refuge is open sunrise to sunset all year.

The Story

The fort here was built to watch a nation. The Rosebud Sioux Tribe calls its people the Sicangu Lakota Oyate, the Burnt Thigh People, and in 1879 General George Crook chose this bend of the Niobrara, about seven miles south of the reservation line and some forty miles from the Rosebud Agency, to keep watch over Spotted Tail's band of about 8,000 Sicangu. Soldiers built Fort Niobrara between April and November 1880. No fight came to it. Its garrisons included the 9th Cavalry in the 1880s and the 25th Infantry from 1902 to 1906, both Black regiments, and John J. Pershing served here in 1891. Valentine, founded in 1882, grew as the fort's market. The last troops marched out on July 28, 1906.

On January 11, 1912, an executive order made the old military reservation a preserve and breeding ground for native birds, and with help from the American Bison Society it became a home for bison and elk. Civilian Conservation Corps crews built a 21-mile big-game fence, dams and wells in the 1930s. A herd of about 350 bison grazes the grasslands now, with elk and both mule and white-tailed deer.

The refuge covers 19,131 acres, about two-thirds of it Sandhills. North of the river, 4,635 acres became Nebraska's first wilderness area in 1976. The Fort Falls Trail drops by stairs to a waterfall in a wooded canyon, and the visitor center on the old fort headquarters site shows fossils of a long-jawed mastodon, giant bison and three-toed horse found on the refuge.

Visitor Info

⏱
Time Needed
Two to three hours.
🎟
Admission
Free. A $1 fee applies to launching tubes, kayaks or canoes at the Fort Niobrara launch site.
📅
Best Season
Late spring through fall; the refuge is open sunrise to sunset all year.
🛣️
Highway
NE-12

On the Map

Nearby

The closest stops worth working into your route

natural8 mi away
Smith Falls State Park
Nebraska's highest waterfall, a spring-fed creek dropping 63 feet into a shaded canyon off the Niobrara, where Ice Age birch and an aspen hybrid found nowhere else still grow.
cultural28 mi away
Buechel Memorial Lakota Museum
A Jesuit's half-century of Lakota words, plants and photographs, gathered with Lakota catechists on the Rosebud and kept where the objects were made and used.
natural28 mi away
Valentine National Wildlife Refuge
About 72,000 acres of Sandhills lakes, marsh and grass south of Valentine, set aside in 1935 for nesting birds, where prairie chickens and sharp-tailed grouse dance in April.
cultural29 mi away
Sinte Gleska University
A university the Rosebud Sioux Tribe built in 1970 to teach its own language and history, with its own bison herd and the tribe's archives on campus.
historical30 mi away
Spotted Tail Gravesite
The grave of the Sicangu leader whose killing by Crow Dog in 1881 went to the Supreme Court and ended with Congress taking criminal law away from the nations.
natural69 mi away
Nebraska National Forest, Bessey Ranger District
A pine forest planted by hand on the Sandhills from 1902 to prove a botanist's theory, still raising seedlings at its nursery and still recovering from the Bovee Fire of 2022.