Fort Keogh:

A Memory of Timber, River, and Soldier on the Edge of the Plains

Nestled where the Yellowstone and Tongue rivers meet—where the wide sky of eastern Montana spills itself into a horizon of coulee and grass—the ruins and remnant landscapes of Fort Keogh hold a story both militarily consequential and deeply human. Founded in the immediate aftermath of one of the nineteenth century’s most traumatic collisions on the northern plains, Fort Keogh was more than a military post: it was an engine of settlement, a locus of conflict and reconciliation, a staging ground for the United States’ westward reach, and finally a center for agricultural science that tethered its martial past to the rural future of Montana. In the following pages I trace Fort Keogh’s arc from a cantonment raised amid grief and retaliation to a 20th-century laboratory of the range—an arc that mirrors, in microcosm, the broader patterns of American expansion and transformation.

Birth amid Aftermath

Fort Keogh’s origin is inseparable from the Battle of the Little Bighorn. In the summer of 1876, after the annihilation of Custer’s immediate command, the U.S. Army sought to reassert presence and control across the Yellowstone country. Colonel Nelson A. Miles moved his 5th Infantry into the area and selected a strategic site at the mouth of the Tongue River; Congress quickly formalized the reservation in July of 1876. From that bank the fort would serve as a base for patrols and campaigns intended to prevent Sioux and Cheyenne bands from eluding federal control and escaping into Canada. ([ARS][1])

Its first incarnation—known initially as the Tongue River Cantonment—was practical and provisional, a cluster of tents and frame buildings arranged to meet military necessities. But these functional structures soon hardened into a permanent post: in 1878 the post was relocated slightly and renamed Fort Keogh in honor of Captain Myles Keogh, one of Custer’s officers killed at the Little Bighorn. The name itself conferred a funerary dignity—a dedication of landscape to loss—and announced the fort’s place in the fast-moving history of the Department of Dakota. ([National Park Service][2])

Garrison, Race, and the Buffalo Soldiers

Throughout the 1880s and 1890s Fort Keogh hosted a rotating roster of regiments—a guard of infantry and cavalry assigned to policing the plains and to helping implement reservation policy. Among these troops were African American regiments—the storied “Buffalo Soldiers”—whose presence complicates any tidy reading of Fort Keogh as solely a site of conquest. The 25th Infantry and other black units were posted in Montana during a period of intense tension between settlers, miners, and Native communities; they performed garrison duty, protected infrastructure, and at times enforced martial law in the wake of labor disputes and other disturbances. Their service at Fort Keogh is memorialized in photographs and in the oral memory of the region, and their complex relationship to both military authority and local communities has been a focus of recent historical recovery. ([Black Past][3])

Fort and Town: The Making of Miles City

Fort Keogh’s presence catalyzed civilian settlement. Traders, packers, and entrepreneurs who catered to soldiers—provisioners of beef, whiskey, and everything in between—laid down the first commercial tracks that became Miles City. As the Great Northern Railway extended toward the Yellowstone, the town grew in Fort Keogh’s shadow, absorbing the economic opportunities and social dislocations of a military frontier. The interplay between post and town was intimate: the fort provided customers, protection, and a rhythm of demand that shaped Miles City’s businesses and social life; in return, Miles City furnished the post with civilian goods and cultural relief. The town that grew up beside the milk-white bend of the Yellowstone—ramshackle at first, then more ordered—bore in its streets the memory of soldiers’ boots and the echo of a frontier becoming a settled place. ([MT Memory][4])

Technology, Horses, and the Remount Era

The twentieth century began with slow change and then accelerated transformation. As frontier conflict abated, Fort Keogh’s military role diminished; the Army gradually withdrew infantry and cavalry as national priorities shifted. By 1909, Fort Keogh was repurposed as a Remount Station—an installation dedicated to procuring, training, and distributing horses and mules for military use. During World War I in particular the station processed enormous numbers of animals destined for European service, connecting the plains to a global war in a way that its founders could not have imagined. Finally, by the early 1920s the Army relinquished much of the land, and the site entered the hands of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. This final reconstitution—military grounds into research grounds—stitched the fort’s martial past to a future devoted to the scientific stewardship of the range. ([ARS][5])

Landscape, Memory, and the Ranching Imagination

What is most arresting about Fort Keogh—what makes it more than a list of dates and garrisons—is how it sits within a landscape that has always been both hospitable and inhospitable to people and livestock. The Yellowstone’s riverine bottomlands, the Tongue’s coulees, and the vast upland grass create a topography that shaped tactical decisions for the Army, dictated ranching practices, and produced the ecological conditions for a distinctive western culture. After its transfer to the USDA, the Fort Keogh Livestock and Range Research Laboratory emerged as a center for range science, soil studies, and livestock management—an institutional attempt to rationalize and sustain the use of this grassland. The laboratory’s work—seeding, controlled burns, grazing studies—has as much to do with preserving a way of life as with promoting productivity: it is part ecological stewardship, part cultural conservation. ([ARS][1])

Indigenous Lives and the Fort’s Shadow

Any history that treats Fort Keogh as merely an American story would be partial. The establishment and operation of the fort were inexorably bound to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples of the Northern Plains. The fort’s raison d’être in 1876—to prevent escape and to contain the post-Little Bighorn bands—places it squarely within a campaign that would remap Indigenous lifeways and territories. For the Lakota, Cheyenne, and other nations, the presence of the fort signified a new and violent geography of restriction: patrols, enforced relocations, and the steady erosion of autonomy. Contemplating the fort’s vestiges, then, demands attention to what was lost—seasonal roundups, sacred sites, and the freedom of movement across plains that had once been open. Recent historiography has been prudent to hold these threads together rather than let the military narrative alone tell the tale.

Memory, Preservation, and the Historic District

By the late twentieth century, a new set of concerns—historic preservation and public memory—reframed Fort Keogh once more. A portion of the military reservation was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and surviving structures—officers’ quarters, barns, parade grounds—became artifacts of a contested past. Community groups in Miles City and federal agencies have worked to interpret the site’s layers: military, agricultural, and indigenous. Photographs, oral histories, and artifacts help tourists and scholars alike to see the fort as a palimpsest—a surface upon which many stories have been written and rewritten. Historic markers and centennial celebrations of the research laboratory remind the region that Fort Keogh is not only a relic but an ongoing presence, its fields still serving as laboratories of living history. ([Wikipedia][6])

Conclusion: A Fort That Became a Field

Fort Keogh’s significance in Montana history lies less in a single grand battle or a singular hero than in its braided functions: military outpost, engine of local development, site of African American service, instrument of federal Indigenous policy, and later a node of agricultural science. It teaches us how institutions reshape landscape and how landscapes, in turn, reconfigure institutions. Standing on the yellow bent of the Yellowstone, with the river’s voice in one ear and the lab’s measured instruments in the other, one can sense the layering of time—the soldier’s step, the cowboy’s lariat, the scientist’s calibrated scale—and hear how the past keeps conversing with the present. Fort Keogh is not a frozen monument; it is a living archive, its soils and structures continuing to inform Montana’s prairie identity.

Works Cited

“Fort Keogh.” *Wikipedia*, Wikimedia Foundation, last edited 2025, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Keogh](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Keogh).

“Fort Keogh Historic District.” *Historic Montana*, [https://historicmt.org/items/show/272](https://historicmt.org/items/show/272).

“Historical Pictures.” *USDA Agricultural Research Service: Fort Keogh Livestock & Range Research Lab*, [https://www.ars.usda.gov/plains-area/miles-city-mt/larrl/docs/historical-pictures/](https://www.ars.usda.gov/plains-area/miles-city-mt/larrl/docs/historical-pictures/).

“Historical Perspective.” *USDA Agricultural Research Service: Fort Keogh Livestock & Range Research Lab*, 11 Oct. 2016, [https://www.ars.usda.gov/plains-area/miles-city-mt/larrl/docs/historical-perspective/](https://www.ars.usda.gov/plains-area/miles-city-mt/larrl/docs/historical-perspective/).

“Legacy of Fort Keogh.” *USDA Agricultural Research Service*, 11 Oct. 2016, [https://www.ars.usda.gov/plains-area/miles-city-mt/larrl/docs/legacy-of-fort-keogh/](https://www.ars.usda.gov/plains-area/miles-city-mt/larrl/docs/legacy-of-fort-keogh/).

“Capt. Myles Keogh.” *Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument*, National Park Service, [https://www.nps.gov/libi/learn/historyculture/capt-myles-keogh.htm](https://www.nps.gov/libi/learn/historyculture/capt-myles-keogh.htm).

“Buffalo Soldiers in Montana (1888–1898).” *BlackPast*, 18 Mar. 2010, [https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/buffalo-soldiers-montana-1888-1898/](https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/buffalo-soldiers-montana-1888-1898/).

Library of Congress, “Buffalo soldiers of the 25th Infantry, some wearing buffalo robes, Ft. Keogh, Montana / Chr. Barthelmess, photographer.” *Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division*, [https://www.loc.gov/item/98501226/](https://www.loc.gov/item/98501226/).

“Miles City.” *Montana Memory Project*, [https://www.mtmemory.org/nodes/view/127836](https://www.mtmemory.org/nodes/view/127836).

Petersen, M.K. “Rangelands History at Fort Keogh.” *USDA ARS Publications*, 2010, [https://www.ars.usda.gov/arsuserfiles/30300000/Publications/RangelandsHistoryArticle2010.pdf](https://www.ars.usda.gov/arsuserfiles/30300000/Publications/RangelandsHistoryArticle2010.pdf).

[1]: https://www.ars.usda.gov/plains-area/miles-city-mt/larrl/docs/legacy-of-fort-keogh/?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Legacy of Fort Keogh - Miles City"

[2]: https://www.nps.gov/libi/learn/historyculture/capt-myles-keogh.htm?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Capt. Myles Keogh - Little Bighorn Battlefield ..."

[3]: https://blackpast.org/african-american-history/buffalo-soldiers-montana-1888-1898/?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Buffalo Soldiers in Montana (1888-1898)"

[4]: https://www.mtmemory.org/nodes/view/127836?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Fort Keogh"

[5]: https://www.ars.usda.gov/plains-area/miles-city-mt/larrl/docs/historical-perspective/?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Historical Perspective - Miles City"

[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Keogh?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Fort Keogh"