Finding the Wild West by Mike Cox

Author:Mike Cox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: TwoDot
Published: 2021-10-29T00:00:00+00:00

MANHATTAN (RILEY COUNTY)

To protect travelers along the Santa Fe and Oregon Trails, the army established Fort Riley (originally Camp Center) in 1853 at the junction of the Republican and Smoky Hill Rivers. Two years later a party of New Englanders organized as the New England Emigrant Aid Company started a community only eight miles from the fort at the confluence of the Big Blue and Kansas Rivers in the northeastern part of newly created Kansas Territory. Despite the noticeable difference in geography, they decided to call the settlement New Boston. But in June 1855, when a riverboat with emigrants from Ohio ran aground near the new community, the stranded settlers opted to stay as long as the New Englanders agreed to rename the place Manhattan.

The town became an important stop for west-bound travelers during the Colorado gold rush of 1859, and it got a further boost when the transcontinental railroad came through in 1867. The Riley County Historical Museum (2309 Claflin Rd.; 785-565-6490) focuses on Manhattan’s history.

A key installation during the Indian Wars, Fort Riley was where the Seventh and Eighth Cavalry Regiments were formed on September 21, 1866. A young lieutenant colonel who had risen to general during the Civil War joined the Seventh in November that year and the following year, on February 27, 1867, he became regimental commander. His name was George Armstrong Custer.

In 1884 Gen. Phil Sheridan, in his annual report to Congress recommended that Fort Riley be designated as the army’s cavalry headquarters and training school. Congress appropriated money for the expansion of the post, and it continued as the actual and spiritual home of the cavalry until the army dismounted that storied branch of the military after World War II.

Kansas travelers have not needed military protection for a long time, but with twenty-first-century duties Fort Riley remains an active military installation. Non-military visitors must show a photo ID and proof of vehicle insurance and undergo a brief background check before being allowed on post. The US Cavalry Museum (Bldg. 205, Huebner Rd.) is in the old post hospital, built in 1855 and remodeled in 1887 to host the newly created cavalry tactics school. A guide to other historic buildings and sites on the post is available at the museum. Also of historical interest is Old Trooper, a statue of a mounted nineteenth-century cavalryman dedicated in 1961 to mark the grave of Chief, the last cavalry horse listed on government rolls. Another monument honors Major Edmund Ogden, who oversaw the post’s construction in 1853 only to die in the cholera epidemic, which two years later claimed some seventy lives at the fort.

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