Narcissa Prentiss Whitman, part 8

By Monday, June 13, 1836, if Eliza Spalding could have viewed St. Louis again she might not have considered it such a moldy and sinful place after their travels thus far. Rough and crude as that western city might have been it would have surely been a welcome site of civilization.

On that date, the missionary party and the fur caravan were treated to a semblance of civilization. On that day they reached what is commonly known as Fort Laramie. Even though at the time it was still called Fort William after mountain man William Sublette, in time it would be known as Fort Laramie.

Mrs. Spalding expressed her delight to be at the fort when, in her diary on June 15, she noted how good it was to see buildings again. From Eliza’s writings we also know that the party camped near the fort and expected to remain there for several days. No doubt she, like Narcissa Whitman, took this opportunity to wash cloths for the first time since leaving Liberty, Missouri. They were, also, delighted to have very comfortable chairs to sit in which were bottomed with buffalo skins.

They probably would have reached the fort sometime sooner had it not been for being stalled by a herd of some 5,000 buffalo. Henry Spalding related the incident in a letter home as a pleasant surprise. He also wrote in the same letter “Tell your dear children all, I remember them. Have seen 5,000 buffalo at once probably. Hope they will all become missionaries.” Spalding’s missionary expectations may have been high but it is certainly hoped that he was expressing his desire that the children would become missionaries, not the buffalo as he had indicated.

Fort Laramie’s existence began in 1834 in the Sioux country where the Black Hills commence. The surrounding area was where the Cheyenne and Arapaho traveled, traded and hunted. It was a natural location for a fur trading post. Missionary Cornelius Rogers, who traveled to Oregon Country in 1838, left a brief description of the fort in his July 3 letter written from the camp of the American Fur Company during the 1838 rendezvous near the Wind River Mountains at the junction of the Popo Agie and Wind Rivers.

Rogers described the establishment, then Fort William, as a stockade enclosure of about 200 feet square. There were buildings located around the inside of this square that left the middle open for work.

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