Fort Sidney

Sidney began in 1867 as a Union Pacific town on Lodgepole Creek, named for Sidney Dillon, a New York lawyer for the railroad, and the army came with the track. On November 19, 1867, Captain Bernard Mimmack and a company of the 30th Infantry set up Sidney Barracks, a sub-post of Fort Sedgwick in Colorado, to guard survey crews, track builders and the finished line. It began as a blockhouse on the bluff with the men in tents, moved below the bluffs about two years later, became an independent post in 1870 and later took the name Fort Sidney. In 1878, when Northern Cheyenne under Morning Star, whom the army called Dull Knife, crossed Kansas and Nebraska from Indian Territory, a special train stood ready at Sidney; it was sent to Ogallala on October 4, but the Cheyenne were already into the Sandhills.

Captain Walter Reed was post surgeon from October 1883 to August 1884. He found the ward "rather full of 'ugly' cases" and conditions bad enough that he suggested closing the post, and his erysipelas patients here became the basis of an 1892 paper, years before his yellow fever work in Havana. The army left on June 1, 1894, and sold the buildings.

Three survive in a neighbourhood just south of downtown: the Post Commander's Home, furnished largely with pieces the officers left or sold when the fort closed, the married officers' quarters holding the Cheyenne County Museum, and the powder magazine.