The post began as a guard for the Red Cloud Agency, which moved to the White River here in 1873, and in March 1874 the tent camp was named for Lieutenant Levi Robinson, killed escorting a wood train. On May 6, 1877, Crazy Horse, Tȟašúŋke Witkó, brought in his band of 889 people and surrendered. On September 5 soldiers moved to lock him in the guardhouse. As he resisted at the door, Private William Gentles drove a bayonet into his back, and he died near midnight in the adjutant's office. Accounts from the army side called it an escape attempt. A marker stands at the place.
In October 1878 troops from the post captured Morning Star's band of 149 Northern Cheyenne, who had left Indian Territory to go home to the north. Ordered back south, Morning Star refused. Captain Henry Wessells cut off their food and fuel, then their water, and at about ten on the night of January 9, 1879, with the temperature below zero and snow on the ground, they broke out of the barracks toward the bluffs. Over the next two weeks soldiers killed thirty-nine men and twenty-five women and children, the last of them at Antelope Creek. Morning Star reached Pine Ridge with part of his family. In 1994 the Northern Cheyenne brought their dead home to Montana.
The fort later became the army's great remount depot, a war dog school and a German prisoner of war camp, and a state park in 1962. History Nebraska runs its history center.
The closest stops worth working into your route