Fort Union National Monument

Fort Union lies in a wide grassy valley north of Las Vegas, near where the Mountain and Cimarron branches of the Santa Fe Trail came together, and the ruts of both can still be traced across the prairie by the visitor center. In 1851 Lieutenant Colonel Edwin Sumner moved the army's department headquarters and supply depot out of Santa Fe, which he called that sink of vice and extravagance, and set them down here.

Three forts stood in the valley. The first, of logs, went up that summer. In 1861, with a Confederate army moving up the Rio Grande, the garrison threw up a star-shaped earthwork with ditches, parapets and bombproofs; its outline still shows in the grass. The third, begun in 1863 and finished in 1869, was almost a town in itself, adobe buildings in the Territorial style: officers' row, barracks, a hospital, a prison, and the depot's warehouses and Mechanics Corral, from which food, clothing, arms and tools went out to posts across the Southwest.

Those supplies served wars. Fort Union's soldiers and stores took part in Kit Carson's campaigns against the Mescalero Apache in 1862 and 1863, the Diné in 1863 and 1864, and the Kiowa and Comanche in 1864 and 1865, and the first two ended with their people marched to Bosque Redondo.

The railroad reached the valley in 1879 and the wagon freighting faded. The army left in 1891, the buildings were stripped of their roofs and timber, and the adobe has been weathering since, stabilized to slow it. A self-guided trail leads through the ruins of the second and third forts. The national monument was created in 1954 on land from the ranch that still surrounds it.