Historic Fort Reno

Fort Reno was built to watch the Cheyenne and Arapaho agency at Darlington, and its hardest test came in 1878. The Northern Cheyenne, sent south after the Great Sioux War of 1876-77, arrived to find the Southern Cheyenne resentful at sharing rations that were already too small. Malaria and other diseases they had never known killed many. In September 1878 about a third of the roughly nine hundred northerners set out for home, believing the treaties of 1851 and 1868 let them live among the Lakota. Two troops of Fort Reno cavalry under Captain Joseph Rendlebrock went after them and fought them several times on the way.

The post policed other lines too. In the 1880s its Buffalo Soldiers of the Ninth Cavalry and its Indian scouts arrested boomers slipping into the Unassigned Lands, and troops of the Fifth Cavalry signaled the start of the 1889 run. In May 1884 a Texas drover named E. M. Horton shot and killed a Cheyenne Dog Soldier who resisted when Horton's horses ran over his garden; the Cheyenne leaders' complaints brought General Philip Sheridan to the fort, and he ordered the Texas cattle off the reservation.

As a remount station the fort trained horses and mules for both world wars, and Will Rogers came to a polo meet there in September 1929. The Agriculture Department took the land in 1948 for livestock and forage research. The post chapel still standing was built by German prisoners of war from the Afrika Korps, and a visitor center keeps photographs and memorabilia.