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WHY ARE SO MANY PLACES NAMED FORT ?

I suspect I’m not alone among people who grew up in the United States and never thought about how frequently the word “Fort” appears in the names of cities, towns, and other locales across the country. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, there are more than four hundred populated places in the United States containing the word fort (long one of the U.S. Army’s preferred terms for a base).1 We’ve seen and heard the names so often that most of us in the United States don’t register the military meaning of cities called Fort Lauderdale, Fort Worth, and Fort Knox or less prominent places such as Fort Carson and Fort Collins (Colorado), Fort Lee (New Jersey), Fort Myers (Florida), Fort Wayne (Indiana), and at least thirteen places in ten states called “Old Fort.”

Many of the actual forts in these cities and towns disappeared well over a century ago. Even where the forts remain as National Park Service sites or, in rare cases, as functioning forts, the military roots of the names are easily forgotten. Several years into my research, I realized I’ve lived in Fort Greene (Brooklyn), picnicked and gone to concerts at Fort Reno (Washington, DC), enjoyed the beach at Fort Funston (San Francisco), and passed through the Fort McHenry Tunnel (Baltimore) hundreds of times driving up and down the East Coast. But rarely did I think about the military significance of these names—or of similar names such as Washington, DC’s Military Road and Battery Kemble Park, where I went sledding as a child. In total, there are more than eight hundred past or present military sites in the United States that have fort in their name.2 The evidence that forts played a critical role in this country’s history is there for all to see, but it is, as anthropologist Catherine Lutz says, “hidden in plain sight.”³

Most people studying U.S. bases outside the United States, myself included, have tended to devote little if any attention to forts within today’s contiguous forty-eight states.⁴ Scholars and others often say that the first U.S. base abroad was in Guantánamo Bay or perhaps the Philippines, Puerto Rico, or Guam. But U.S. Army forts and posts (the Army’s other preferred term) of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were built on Native American territory that was very much abroad at the time.

By overlooking U.S. forts in North America, many scholars have inadvertently contributed to naturalizing U.S. expansion, warfare, and colonization across the continent. Ignoring the construction of U.S. forts on Native American peoples’ lands has likewise made it more difficult to see the United States as an empire. Some scholars of empire have tended to make a similar mistake by marking the U.S. war with Spain in 1898 and the acquisition of colonies outside North America as the beginning of the era of U.S. imperialism. In these histories the genocidal conquest of American Indians and the ongoing occupation of indigenous lands get little attention. So too there’s been little attention directed toward the role that early bases abroad played in enabling a near-constant series of wars that expanded U.S. domination across North America and eventually beyond.

Rather than distinguishing between periods of continental and extracontinental expansion, it’s important to understand the relative continuity in the pattern of base construction, warfare, and territorial expansion from independence until the start of World War II. The U.S. Army was what one historian calls the “advance agent” and “pry bar” of Euro-American conquest.⁵ And it was a rapidly expanding chain of western forts that provided the iron for that pry bar, while marking the line of westward expansion.

From the perspective of the indigenous peoples of North America, all the military bases of the United States and other European colonizers—whether within the original thirteen states or otherwise—are foreign bases. These bases have, after all, occupied the territory of the original inhabitants of the land. The first bases outside the thirteen states of the colonists who declared independence in 1776 appeared even before the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The bases were in British-controlled Canada. After the clashes in Massachusetts at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill started the war in 1775, the newly appointed Commander in Chief of the Continental Army, Gen. George Washington, and other revolutionary leaders hoped an invasion of Canada would encourage what they considered the fourteenth colony to join their rebellion. Some of the pro-independence leaders considered the expansion of the thirteen colonies into Canada inevitable. In the summer of 1775, the Continental Congress instructed Maj. Gen. Philip Schuyler to seize Montréal, Saint Jean, and “any other parts of the country” if “practicable, and not disagreeable to the Canadians.”6 Shortly after, patriot military forces invaded Canada south of Montréal.

The invasion was a disaster. In late 1775 the invading troops captured Fort Saint Jean, across the Saint Lawrence River, south of Montréal. They entered Montréal unopposed and established a garrison there during a little-remembered occupation that would last until the summer of 1776. Pro-independence troops would get little farther. An attempt to take Quebec City failed in the face of more numerous British troops and Canadian militiamen, inadequate supplies, starvation, disease, desertions, and drownings in the Saint Lawrence. With the contracts of about half the enlistees set to expire on New Year’s Day, a final attempted siege on December 30, in the middle of a blizzard, collapsed. The general leading the attack on Quebec City, Richard Montgomery, was killed. Another of the leaders, Col. Benedict Arnold, was wounded. Arnold would infamously change sides later in the war. Only two regiments of Canadians, totaling around two thousand men, changed sides to join the rebellion. By mid-July 1776, just days after the Declaration of Independence, disorganized and defeated troops left Canada and returned to Fort Ticonderoga, in today’s upstate New York.⁷ Despite the disaster, the invasion of Canada would prove just the first of many attempts to expand U.S. territory by invading neighboring nations north, south, west, and east. The defeat in Canada led General Washington and other revolutionary leaders to focus mostly—but not entirely—on evicting British troops from the thirteen colonies. The war stretched on for seven more years. With the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783, British troops left their last fortifications in Savannah, Charleston, and New York City.

Map 6. Native Lands and Early U.S. Military Bases Abroad.

U.S. Army forts enabled the expansion of the U.S. Empire across North America. This map depicts major forts and the lands controlled by indigenous nations and peoples at the time of U.S independence in 1776. Map by John Emerson and Siobhán McGuirk. Sources: Sam B. Hilliard, “Indian Land Cessions,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 62, no. 2 (1972): 374; Richard W. Stewart, ed., American Military History, vol. 1, The United States Army and the Forging of a Nation, 1775–1917, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, 2005), chap. 14. An earlier version was published in David Vine, Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World (New York: Metropolitan, 2015).

Throughout the war for independence, the Continental Army and local militias and settlers pursued an interrelated series of relatively “small but brutal wars” with indigenous nations and peoples.8 The wars were waged primarily in the Ohio Valley and western New York. There, historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz explains, colonists fought “Indigenous resisters who realized it was not in their interest to have a close enemy of settlers with an independent government, as opposed to a remote one in Great Britain.” These conflicts were part of an already two-centuries-old war between Euro-American settlers attempting to take land and the inhabitants of the land. From the seventeenth century “generations of settlers, mostly [male] farmers, gained experiences as ‘Indian fighters’ outside of any organized military institution,” Dunbar-Ortiz writes. Bounties paid by colonial governments for Native people’s scalps provided an immediate financial incentive for expansionism and extreme violence.⁹

When the thirteen North American colonies began moving toward independence from Britain in the middle of the eighteenth century, the colonies’ leaders looked to the European empires as models for what the colonies might become. An “expansionist consensus” helped unify the revolutionaries around the “notion of a pre-emptive right to the continent” and the vision of a united continental empire stretching across North America.¹⁰ Perceptions of difference rooted in the developing pseudoscientific idea of race meant that few Euro-Americans considered the idea that the land might rightfully belong to Native groups.

Anglo settlers’ aggression had been on the rise particularly since the British Empire’s victory in 1763 over the French Empire in the “French and Indian War.” Amid growing land speculation settlers began pushing westward into the Ohio Valley by the early 1770s. The Shawnee Nation responded to the encroachment by raiding some of the settlements. The British governor of Virginia (himself a speculator) used militia and ranger forces to retaliate by destroying Shawnee towns and arms supplies and “distress[ing] them in every other way that is possible.”11 Three decades of warfare between Anglo settlers and the Shawnee and their indigenous allies followed. A longer century of warfare and colonization was likewise set in motion from the Ohio Valley to the Pacific. A clear pattern formed: vanguard farmers and Euro-American “Indian fighters” entered into and settled on indigenous lands and then called on the government and military forces to protect them.¹²

In 1777 the Shawnee resistance allied with Britain to try to hold off the colonizers. The Shawnees pushed some of the settlers from their territory. When pro-independence forces started gaining the upper hand in the revolution, the Continental Congress launched a campaign to wipe out the Shawnee and any nearby Indian communities, whether allied with the Shawnee or not. The Congress gave orders to “destroy such towns of hostile tribes of Indians as . . . will most effectively chastise and terrify the savages, and check their ravages on the frontiers.” Militiamen and Army regulars waged what has been called a “genocidal campaign” against combatants and noncombatants alike. In eastern Ohio, in a neutral Delaware village that had been Christianized by Moravian missionaries, Pennsylvania militia forced more than ninety women, men, and children into two houses before slaughtering them with a large hammer and other weapons.¹³

The commander of nearby Fort Pitt, Col. Daniel Brodhead, attacked another nearby Moravian town, killing fifteen men and taking twenty old men, women, and children prisoner. Brodhead and his men took the captives back to Fort Pitt. Described as “humane and chivalric” in a report later submitted to Congress, Brodhead had the men taken to the outskirts of town, where their captors killed and scalped them.¹⁴

Air Force officer and professor of history at the U.S. Air Force Academy John Grenier writes that while atrocities were “frequent” before the massacre, they “became commonplace thereafter.” From the Carolinas southward to the western reaches of Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York, gruesome, “extravagant violence” and reciprocal raiding, scalping, and killing between settlers and Native Americans became the norm. Conflicts became “unrestrained struggles for the complete destruction of the enemy.”15 A scorched-earth campaign of terror by the Continental Army, local militias, and frontiersmen, coupled with the westward flight of indigenous communities, left no doubt about who experienced the preponderance of suffering.¹⁶ Throughout the Revolutionary War, writes Dunbar-Ortiz, “armed settlers waged total war against Indigenous people, largely realizing their objectives.” Grenier argues that the frontier wars developed “America’s first way of war” and that this mode of warfare has remained part of U.S. military practice until today. This is a mode of warfare that “condoned the use of violence against noncombatants,” Grenier explains. Indeed, it focused on “attacking and destroying Indian noncombatant populations,” and regularly employed tactics included “razing and destroying enemy villages and fields; killing enemy women and children; raiding settlements for captives; intimidating and brutalizing enemy noncombatants; and assassinating enemy leaders.”¹⁷

The roots of this way of war can be traced further back in history. Some of the leaders of the first settlements in North America, such as John Smith in Jamestown, were mercenaries who arrived on the continent with experience fighting in brutally violent European religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They brought with them the kinds of tactics in which burning entire towns and targeting noncombatants were common. “Tragically for the Indian peoples of the eastern seaboard” and for indigenous peoples who would be the victims of subsequent colonialists who inherited this way of war, “the mercenaries unleashed a similar way of war in early Virginia and New England.”¹⁸

Gen. George Washington was not exempt from these historical patterns. When the Mohawk and Seneca Nations decided to side with Britain during the war for independence, Washington sent orders to Maj. Gen. John Sullivan: “Lay waste all the settlements around, that the country may not be merely overrun but destroyed. . . . You will not by any means, listen to any overture of peace before the total ruin of their settlements is effected.”¹⁹ Sullivan replied, “The Indians shall see that there is malice enough in our hearts to destroy everything that contributes to their support.”²⁰

Beyond a way of warfare, this mode of total genocidal war became important to the development of a distinct U.S. American identity. This identity in turn has played some role in shaping later wars and the conduct of those wars, especially against peoples deemed to be supposedly racially inferior. “Successive generations of Americans, both soldiers and civilians, made the killing of Indian men, women, and children a defining element of their first military tradition, and thereby part of a shared American identity,” writes Grenier. Racism and violence were deeply intertwined. Grenier shows, however, that violence largely led to racism rather than vice versa. The idea of race and defined “white” and “Indian” races solidified only in the mid-eighteenth century, long after the cycles of brutality and settlers’ “shockingly violent campaigns to achieve their goals of conquest” were well underway. “Only after seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century Americans made the first way of war a key to being a white American,” explains Grenier, “could later generations of ‘Indian haters,’ men like Andrew Jackson, turn the Indian wars into race wars.”21

In 1785, little more than a year after the end of the war for independence, the U.S. Army was starting what would become a century-long continent-wide fort-construction program. The first base was Fort Harmar. It was located near present-day Marietta, Ohio, roughly equidistant from Columbus and Pittsburgh. At the time it was in the “Northwest Territory.” This was the area of today’s Midwest United States, beyond the thirteen states that Britain included in generous territory it had previously claimed and ceded to the newly independent nation at the end of the revolution. Of course, the land was still occupied by Native peoples.

In 1784 the Continental Congress deployed Col. Josiah Harmar to the frontier in the Northwest Territory. Harmar’s charge was to discourage U.S. settlers from moving into the Ohio Territory before the government could survey the land and put it up for sale. In October 1785 Harmar ordered his men to build a fort near the junction of the Ohio and Muskingum Rivers. Rather than discourage settlement, the fort did the opposite: it encouraged more settlers to push westward in the belief that the fort would protect them from attacks by Native Americans.²²

At the time the new nation was in a relatively strong position militarily. After the end of the war with Britain, there was “little actual military threat to the United States,” explains an Army military history.23 Having agreed to an end to its American war, the British monarchy had no desire to renew hostilities in an attempt to reconquer its lost colonies. British leaders, along with their Spanish colonial counterparts in North America, sought mostly to prevent the United States from expanding beyond the new nation’s borders. The breadth of the Atlantic Ocean presented a major impediment to any European power who would have contemplated invading the United States. Commander in Chief of the Continental Army George Washington called for the creation of a permanent army of just over 2,600 men, aided only by small, relatively informal state militias.

“Fortunately for us our relative situation requires but few” soldiers, he explained in a 1783 letter to the Continental Congress. “The same circumstances which so effectually retarded, and in the end conspired to defeat the attempts of Britain to subdue us, will now powerfully tend to render us secure. Our distance from the European States in a great degree frees us of apprehension, from their numerous regular forces and the Insults and dangers which are to be dreaded from their Ambition.” Washington outlined a plan to maintain military posts along the borders with Canada, Spanish Florida, and the western frontier “to awe the Indians, protect our [pelt and fur] Trade, prevent the encroachment of our Neighbours of Canada and the Florida’s, and guard us at least from surprizes [sic].” He noted that a “strong post” in the Northwest Territory, near today’s Columbus, Ohio, would be “indispensably necessary for the security of the present Settlers” who were likely to “immediately settle within those Limits.”²⁴

U.S. settlers would, indeed, immediately settle within and beyond the nation’s limits. Most of the Indian peoples affected by the often violent movement of immigrants resisted fiercely. Some launched raids on settlements near the advancing line of colonization, but none were in a position to retake significant territory or otherwise threaten the United States.²⁵ To try to prevent U.S. expansion, Britain provided some support to allied Native peoples; until 1796 British troops remained in a series of forts on the territory near the Canadian border that Britain had technically ceded to the United States in the Treaty of Paris. As settlers pushed westward, they demanded protection from the new federal government.²⁶ The Army built a growing number of forts to counter British, Native American, French, and Spanish influence. Most of the new installations were in the Northwest Territory, where they were intended to oppose British fur traders, protect U.S. trading posts, and assert U.S. dominance in the face of British and Indian settlements.27

In January 1790 President George Washington gave his first annual address to Congress. Washington called for a buildup of the size of the Army and the military presence along the frontier. A movement of Native peoples in the Northwest Territory had been growing powerful, united by the desire to retake their homelands. With British forts in the Great Lakes region providing arms and supplies, Washington feared that U.S. expansion would be blocked by the Miami Confederacy. Congress authorized an increase in the size of the regular Army. Secretary of War Henry Knox ordered now General Josiah Harmar to lead a force of regulars backed by militiamen to attack a powerful coalition of mostly Miami and Shawnee in a rapid show of force aimed at destroying their forces and food supplies. This would prove the start of five years of warfare in Ohio country.²⁸

Fort Washington, built in 1789 in what is now Cincinnati, provided the base from which Harmar and his troops launched their invasion. They reached Kekionga, a major Miami town and trading post (in today’s Fort Wayne, Indiana), and several nearby Miami, Delaware, and Shawnee villages. They found Kekionga and the other villages abandoned. Some of Harmar’s troops began looting.²⁹ After his commanders brought the men under control, Harmar divided his forces to look for their enemy. Over a period of four days, they were twice ambushed. Almost two hundred U.S. fighters lay dead. Harmar was forced to retreat while the Miami and Shawnee celebrated pushing back the invaders.³⁰ The battle became known as “Harmar’s Humiliation.”

After Harmar and his surviving men retreated to Fort Washington, Congress authorized a second, larger invasion force in 1791. The expedition would be led by the governor of the Northwest Territory, the newly named Major General Arthur St. Clair. According to one history of U.S. military strategy, St. Clair’s campaign made Harmar’s Humiliation “look like [a] masterpiece.”³¹ The general’s expedition earned a name of its own: “St. Clair’s Shame.” The often sickly troops marched about one hundred miles from Fort Washington. In the early morning hours of November 4, around 1,000 Indians attacked, killing 637 and wounding 263 more. Less than half of St. Clair’s force returned to Fort Washington physically unharmed.32

Some in the new nation now called for an end to the wars against Native peoples and the acceptance of an Indian buffer state proposed by British officials. President Washington would have none of it. He ordered a third invasion into Indian territory, and Congress authorized a doubling of the size of the Army. Washington appointed a general who had gained military fame during the revolution to lead the expedition, despite concerns that Maj. Gen. “Mad” Anthony Wayne was “addicted to the bottle.” Wayne had also recently been removed from Congress for election irregularities after he sought office to escape prosecution from large debts incurred after the war.³³

In the spring of 1793, Wayne took a large force to Fort Washington. The base would again serve as the launchpad for his army’s invasion. After trying to get his Indian opponents to surrender, Wayne marched his troops to confront the allied Native nations from across the Northwest. Along his route he and his men methodically built new forts and smaller, reinforced blockhouses, which provided protected firing positions for riflemen. He systematically burned Indian villages and destroyed their crops.

When combined Indian forces attempted to stop the destruction by confronting Wayne’s army in open battle, they suffered a devastating defeat at the “Battle of Fallen Timbers.” Wayne considered attacking the nearby British base Fort Miamis. It had previously provided protection to Britain’s Native American allies. But Wayne thought better of the idea, given the fort’s strength and his fear of setting off another war with the British.³⁴ Wayne’s forces spent the next three days turning villages along the Maumee River valley into a state of “general devastation and conflagration,” as Wayne later described it. A week later U.S. troops did the same to villages in the nearby Auglaize River valley. Wayne then marched his troops back to a collection of blockhouses he called Fort Defiance, “laying waste the villages and cornfields for about fifty miles on each side of the Miami [River].”³⁵ On the site of Kekionga, Wayne’s men built another new fort, soon to be called Fort Wayne.

A similar pattern continued throughout the borderlands of the country. “US genocidal wars against Indigenous nations continued unabated in the 1790s,” writes Dunbar-Ortiz. In the Northwest Territory and beyond, “brutal counterinsurgency warfare would be the key to the army’s destruction of the Indigenous peoples’ civilization.”36 In the Ohio Valley in the summer of 1795, the shattered tribes of Wyandots, Delawares, Shawnees, Odawas, Chippewas, Potawatomis, Miamis, Eel Rivers, Weas, Kickapoos, Piankashaws, and Kaskaskias signed the Treaty of Greenville. In exchange for peace, they gave up large swaths of Ohio River valley lands to the United States.³⁷

The situation for Native Americans in the region only got worse. Shortly before the signing of the Treaty of Greenville, the conditions of the 1794 U.S. treaty with Britain were announced. “Jay’s Treaty” (U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Jay signed for the United States) effectively meant that Britain had ceded sovereignty over the Northwest to the United States. British officials finally agreed to abandon the thirteen forts within the boundaries of the United States that British troops had been occupying since the end of the Revolutionary War. With the departure Britain abandoned its support for its Native American allies. Holding off U.S. settlers became increasingly difficult. The settlers quickly moved farther into Indian-claimed lands in Ohio Territory. Many settlers soon wanted more.

In Spanish-controlled Florida, a similar story was underway. Spanish colonial officials withdrew support for Native peoples in the South, clearing the way for further U.S. expansion and settlement. To aid in the process, the War Department shifted U.S. forces from Ohio to what would become a growing number of forts on and beyond the southern frontier.³⁸

Fueled by expansionist desires, surging feelings of nationalism, a growing population, land speculation, and government leaders wanting to pay off the country’s war debts by selling western lands (still inconveniently occupied by Native Americans), waves of settlers and speculators moved westward after independence. The colonizers pushed Indians progressively away from the East Coast. “Land and more land” is what settlers and many state governments wanted, writes Reginald Horsman. To the settlers Native peoples were mere obstacles “to drive out or annihilate”; their land claims were simply “invalid.”³⁹

Map 7. U.S. Bases, Wars, and Expansion Abroad, 1776–1803.

Significant bases, combat, and expansion outside U.S. states are shown. U.S. borders are for 1803. Key sources: Dunbar-Ortiz, Indigenous Peoples’ History; “Fort Wiki,” accessed June 13, 2019, www.fortwiki.com; Grenier, First Way of War; “North American Forts, 1526–1956,” accessed June 13, 2019, www.northamericanforts.com; Barbara Salazar Torreon and Sofia Plagakis, Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798–2018 (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2018).

As settlers moved westward and expanded the boundaries of U.S.-controlled lands, the Army helped enable the process with a growing number of forts. Within about a decade of the establishment of Fort Harmar in the Northwest Territory in 1785, U.S. troops occupied the major Fort Detroit and around a dozen smaller bases in the region, including Forts Defiance and Washington.40 Hundreds more frontier forts would follow.

Forts were never ends in themselves. Army posts played critical roles in opening access to natural resources, land, new markets, and trading relationships. They were particularly important in challenging British, Spanish, French, and Native American influence and power. Forts were especially vital in helping U.S. settlers and businesses challenge and supplant the dominance of British traders, while also protecting and advancing the profit-making interests of U.S. settlers and businesses more broadly. As the example of Fort Harmar illustrates, even when some military officials may have conceived of forts as purely defensive or as tools to hold settlers back and keep the peace, rarely (if ever) was that the case. Settlers saw the forts as protection. Forts helped embolden them to push farther westward in search of land, resources, and profit.

Forts played an especially critical role in the economic growth and geographic expansion of the U.S. fur trade. This expansion in turn helped encourage and almost literally pave the way for other settlers moving westward. “Viewed in the broadest sense,” writes David Wishart, “the fur trade was the vanguard of a massive wave of Euro-American colonisation.”⁴¹ Fur trappers played a role in westward colonization similar to that which artists have played much more recently in the gentrification of urban neighborhoods: artists have developed businesses and business opportunities, brought police protection, and made the “gentry” feel safe enough to follow them into poorer neighborhoods that wealthier classes formerly saw as scary. (The comparison between colonization and gentrification may seem inappropriate; gentrifiers’ frequent use of frontier, pioneer, and cowboy-and-Indian metaphors suggests otherwise.)⁴²

U.S. bases in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were even more deeply intertwined with economic interests because many forts were really as much armed trading posts as they were strictly military installations. In this way U.S. military bases of the day often resembled the colonial entrepôts, feitorias, and other colocated bases–cum–trading posts of earlier empires and powers, such as Portugal and Genoa.

On January 18, 1803, “for the purpose of extending the external commerce of the United States,” President Thomas Jefferson asked Congress for a small and seemingly insignificant appropriation of $2,500. The money was to fund an expedition led by “an intelligent officer, with ten or twelve chosen men, fit for the enterprise, and willing to undertake it, taken from our [military] posts, where they may be spared without inconvenience.”43 Congress soon approved the funds for what became the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Historians, textbooks, and politicians have often uncritically celebrated the expedition purely as an expedition and key moment in early U.S. history—the work of brave adventurers venturing into the unknown of the West (unknown to Euro-Americans at least). One celebratory history writes, “The Lewis and Clark Expedition has become an enduring symbol of the American spirit, selfless service, and human achievement.”⁴⁴

What most have forgotten is that the expedition was a military expedition planned prior to the Louisiana Purchase, with which it is generally linked. The expedition’s leaders were a U.S. Army captain, Meriwether Lewis, and a former infantry company commander, William Clark. “The Lewis and Clark Expedition (1803–1806) was a military mission from start to finish,” writes an official Army history. “The US Army furnished the organization and much of the manpower, equipment, and supplies. Over the course of two years, four months, and ten days, the soldiers traveled 7,689 miles and brought back invaluable geographic and scientific data, including the first detailed map of the region.”⁴⁵ Unsurprisingly, the geographic and scientific data from the expedition were more than of purely academic interest. The information was critical to future military operations, including fort construction, natural resource exploitation, and westward colonization by settlers. Two subsequent expeditions to the Mississippi headwaters and the Southwest by Capt. Zebulon Pike were similarly important.

As Jefferson’s letter to Congress shows, the president was carefully plotting the future commercial and demographic expansion of the United States. That the expedition “should incidentally advance the geographical knowledge of our own continent” was never the primary aim but “an additional gratification.”46 The expedition’s main aim was to investigate and develop trading relations with Native peoples from the Mississippi River clear to the Pacific Ocean in the interest of extending a chain of federal trading houses for the exchange of furs and pelts. U.S. politicians and others elites “believed that US fur traders could work within the existing trade networks to pave the way for US expansion,” writes Wishart. President Jefferson in particular saw the fur trade as the first stage in the settlement process. It would be an “overture” to encourage westward colonization.⁴⁷

With the Lewis and Clark Expedition underway, the westward colonization process was greatly eased for Euro-Americans when Jefferson purchased around 530 million acres of western land from the French government. In 1800 Spain had secretly ceded control of the Louisiana Territory to France. News of the transfer worried Jefferson and other U.S. leaders. They now faced a strong colonial power, France, as a neighbor rather than the declining Spanish Empire. Jefferson began to investigate the purchase of Louisiana. His timing was auspicious, as Napoleon Bonaparte needed an infusion of cash in anticipation of a new war with Britain and other European powers. In April 1803 the two governments signed a draft treaty for the sale. By year’s end the U.S. Army formally took possession of the territory. The Army established a small garrison in New Orleans and proceeded to occupy former Spanish forts along the lower Mississippi River.⁴⁸ Many more forts would soon follow across the West.

Just as Jefferson hoped and planned, fur trappers and fur companies came to play a “catalytic role” in colonizing western lands. The Lewis and Clark Expedition reported that the headwaters of the Missouri River were “richer in beaver and otter than any country on earth.” Even before they returned to Saint Louis in September 1806, U.S. fur traders were traveling up the Missouri to build trading relationships with Mandan villages, which had previously been trading territory monopolized by the British-Canadian North West Company.⁴⁹ Urged on by George Washington, U.S. officials moved to create a “factory system” in the northern plains along the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers: at Forts Osage, Madison, Shelby, Armstrong, and Snelling, among other base-trading posts, “Indian agents” sold manufactured goods to Native buyers in exchange for furs and pelts. Initially, Native American peoples “vied with one another to attract U.S. forts with which to trade.”⁵⁰

Unsurprisingly, the rise in trapping and associated hunting reduced the availability of game for peoples who had long depended on it, including the Iowa, Omaha, Otoe, Missouria, Pawnee, Sac, and Sioux.51 The trade also led to wide-scale deforestation along the upper Missouri River as a result of demand for wood to fuel, build, and heat the steamboats and trading posts. While populations of beaver, otter, mink, sable, deer, martens, weasels, raccoons, bears, wolves, foxes, and other game experienced short-term declines, most would rebound with the help of conservation efforts. By contrast, across the West, the buffalo moved rapidly toward extinction. The arrival of the railroads in the 1870s later allowed the fastest killing spree. By 1890 fewer than one thousand buffalo remained.⁵²

Beyond the killing of the buffalo, “the fur trade,” writes Wishart, “set the pace for subsequent Euro-American activity in the West. The attitude of rapacious, short-term exploitation which was imprinted during the fur trade persisted . . . as the focus shifted from furs to minerals, timber, land, and water” over the course of the nineteenth century. The profits in fur were so great that, as early as 1810, New York–based business magnate John Jacob Astor began trying to build an “international trade empire” on the Pacific coast. Astor hoped to take on British and Russian competitors, then dominating the lucrative sale of furs to markets in China. By 1811 his Pacific Fur Trading Company established itself at its own armed trading post, Fort Astoria, at the mouth of the Columbia River, in Oregon. But the company soon folded around the start of the War of 1812, when it was clear that it was too far west to receive protection from the U.S. military.⁵³ Astor had in effect moved too quickly westward for the protection services of the U.S. military to keep up. Astor’s failure shows how the intertwined and interdependent relationship between bases and businesses was never automatic and far from seamless; thousands of settlers and settler businesses failed due to bankruptcies, deaths, and other calamities.

Christian missionaries joined those seeking fortunes in attaching themselves to the fur trade. Missionaries used fur-trading posts and fur-company steamships for transportation to gain access to Native peoples they sought to convert. Through conversion and other missionary work, missionaries further catalyzed the colonization process. This had the general effect of further disrupting indigenous societies, assisting with Euro-American conquest and the settlement of indigenous lands. Wishart concludes, “The fur trader undermined the Indian societies and paved the way for a settlement process that would eventually result in the dispossession of the Indians’ lands and in the shattering of Indian culture[s].”54 Small numbers of American Indians profited in the short term, mostly through trade. The cumulative effect of the processes associated with settler colonialism—base creation, warfare, disease epidemics, the fur trade and other resource extraction, capitalist economic transformation, environmental damage, and religious conversion—was catastrophic for indigenous peoples.

Around 1806 tensions between the United States and Spain were growing over the location of the border between the newly purchased Louisiana Territory and Spanish-controlled North America. President Jefferson deployed militiamen and one thousand soldiers to the Sabine River amid rumors that Spain was massing soldiers in East Texas. A tense standoff and small skirmishes followed, but the commanders on both sides averted war or any greater bloodshed.⁵⁵ Averting war in East Texas is a reminder that the wars enabled by bases and the larger colonization process weren’t inevitable. U.S. leaders and settlers could have pursued other relations with Native American peoples, for example. British leaders did. Some in the new nations also called for a different, more peaceful path.

Still, in just two decades since declaring independence and fighting an eight-year war with Britain, the U.S. military fought with Canadians, Spaniards, and even Revolutionary War ally France. More than against any other foe, U.S. military forces fought repeatedly and with special ferocity against dozens of Native American nations. U.S. Army forts were catalysts in many of these wars and battles. Today few know the military history of the hundreds of places in the United States named fort: how forts beyond the thirteen states helped propel Euro-American conquest of Native peoples’ lands, how forts helped expand natural-resource extraction, how forts helped dominate trade, and how forts helped contribute to the deaths of probably millions of indigenous people and tens of thousands of settlers, soldiers, and militiamen. U.S. forts beyond the frontier did none of this alone. They did, however, play a critical catalytic role in these interlinked dimensions of the colonization process.

With the history of forts in North America and the wars and conquest they have enabled often “hidden in plain sight” in the names of cities and towns across the country, I was surprised when I started to see depictions of a fort on a license plate, of all places. The state of Maryland issued the plates to mark the two hundredth anniversary of the war the United States launched against Great Britain in 1812, with another invasion of British-controlled Canada. The invasion followed congressional approval of a declaration of war against Britain. A separate vote to wage a simultaneous war against France failed in the Senate by just two votes.