Last Day in Buffalo & Lots of History 7/10/2010

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!THERE ARE 2 BLOGS TODAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


This was our last day in Buffalo so we had a few more interesting caches to do before we leave tomorrow so off we went north after we found the last cache in a park in Buffalo. Three of the caches we had today were virtuals and the first one was located at Fort Phil Kearny. Fort Phil Kearny was an outpost of the United States Army that existed in the late 1860s in present-day northeastern Wyoming along the Bozeman Trail. Construction began July 13, 1866 by Companies A, C, E and H of the 2nd Battalion, 18th Infantry, under the direction of the regimental commander and Mountain District commander Col. Henry B. Carrington. The post was named for Maj. Gen. Philip Kearny, a popular figure in the American Civil War. The fort should be distinguished from the similarly-named Fort Kearny in Nebraska, which was named for Kearny's uncle Stephen W. Kearny. Today, the fort and the nearby Fetterman and Wagon Box battle sites are maintained by the State of Wyoming as the Fort Phil Kearny State Historic Site.
The fort was located along the east side of the Bighorn Mountains in present-day northern Johnson County, approximately 15 miles north of Buffalo. Along with Fort Reno and Fort C. F. Smith, the fort was established along the Bozeman Trail in the Powder River Country at the height of the Indian Wars to protect prospective miners traveling the trail north from the Oregon Trail to present-day Montana.
Fort Phil Kearny was the largest of the three stockaded fortifications along the trail. Its eight foot high log walls enclosed an area of 17 acres. The walls measured 1,496 feet in length, tapering in width from 600 feet on the north to 240 feet on the south. Construction of the stockade required more than 4,000 logs. In 1867, the building construction required over 606,000 board feet of lumber and 130,000 adobe bricks.
The fort was under continuous construction and was nearing completion in December 1866, when its garrison was due to be re-designated the 27th Infantry. At its peak strength the garrison numbered 400 troops and 150 civilians: 9 officers, a surgeon, and 329 enlisted men of five infantry companies of the 18th/27th Infantry, including the newly-recruited Company K, 27th; one officer and 60 men of Company C, 2nd Cavalry, and 150 civilian quartermaster and contractor employees.
The fort, known to the Indians as the "hated post on the Little Piney",[4] played an important role in Red Cloud's War. The area around the fort was the site of the Fetterman massacre and the Wagon Box Fight. By 1868, the Union Pacific Railroad had reached far enough west that emigrants could reach the Montana gold fields through present-day Idaho, rendering the dangerous Bozeman Trail obsolete. All three forts along the trail were abandoned as part of the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868). Shortly after, it was burned by Cheyenne Indians.
Fort Phil Kearny, including the nearby sites of the Fetterman massacre and the Wagon Box Fight, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1960.
Fort Phil Kearny State Historic Site includes a visitor's center with exhibits, videos, a bookstore, and self-guided tours of the fort ruins and outlying sites. The tour marks the archaeological remains of the fort's buildings. A cabin built by the Civilian Conservation Corps has been furnished to depict the period quarters of an officer's wife and a non-commissioned officer’s quarters. Visitors can also tour the nearby battlefields and interpretive trails. We walked through the visitor's center and museum first and then went out to walk through the fort site although there wasn't much left except the interpretive trail with a lot of plaques explaining where everything was.



Then it was down the road to the site of the John "Portugee" Phillips Monument. As the man credited for carrying the news of the Fetterman Disaster through hostile Indian country 236 miles from Fort Phil Kearny to Fort Laramie, John "Portuguese" Phillips has long been celebrated in histories, novels, and poems, as Wyoming's frontier hero. While time has diminished his achievement, as fact has replaced fiction, he remains a man worthy of respect and admiration, exemplifying pioneer qualities of self-sacrifice and endurance.
John Phillips was born Manual Felipe Cardoso on April 8, 1832, the fourth of nine children of Felipe and Maria Cardoso. Born near the town of Terra, on the island of Pico, in the Azores, he entered life as a citizen of Portugal. At the age of 18, he left the Azores aboard a whaling vessel bound for California, where the youth intended to pan for gold.
For the next 15 years, he followed the lure of yellow metal in California, Oregon, and Idaho, reaching the Montana fields in 1865. In spring of 1866, he joined a party of miners headed for the Pryor and Big Horn Mountains, prospecting until the first snows of late summer. Arriving with 42 of his compatriots at Fort Phil Kearny on September 14, he apparently worked as a water carrier for a civilian contractor.
Following the annihilation of Capt. William J. Fetterman and his command on December 21, Phillips volunteered to ride to the telegraph office at Horseshoe Station on the North Platte with Col. Henry B. Carrington's dispatches, about 190 miles in subzero weather. While the general story is that he rode alone on this perilous mission, Phillips was in fact accompanied by one Daniel Dixon to Fort Reno and by others along the way, including Robert Bailey. The pay for the service was $300 apiece for Phillips and Dixon, which they received in January, 1867.
In a reminiscence, Carrington stated that Phillips chose one of his horses for the ride. Jack Wallace, a contractor's employee, reported the name of the animal as "Dandy," a blue grass horse, black with three stocking feet. Wallace also stated that Carrington gave Phillips a Spencer repeating rifle and 100 rounds of ammunition, which he strapped on his ankles, the weight keeping his feet firmly in the stirrups. The first stop was Fort Reno, which the couriers reached in the early hours of December 23. There they received an additional message from Lt. Col. Henry Wessells to carry to Col. Innis Palmer at Fort Laramie, thus extending their obligation.
According to the telegrapher at Horseshoe Station, Phillips, Dixon, and Robert Bailey arrived about 10 a.m. on December 25, when the dispatches were wired to the headquarters of the Department of the Platte in Omaha and to Washington. To deliver the message from Wessells to Palmer, Phillips went on to Fort Laramie, arriving at 11 p.m., where a full dress ball was in progress. The appearance of the huge form of Phillips, garbed in a buffalo overcoat, pants, gauntlets, and cap, quieted the festivities, and his message caused preparations for a rescue party, delayed in departing by deeps snows until January 6. In addition to receiving his pay, Phillips was given the best horse in Company F of the 2nd Cavalry.
Although Phillips did not ride alone, he was certainly of the stuff from which heroes are made. When carrying mail back to Fort Phil Kearny from Fort Laramie in mid-April, 1867, he at one point found himself surrounded by fifteen Sioux in war paint. With humorous self-deprecation, he wrote in a report to his superiors that he had escaped, but noted that "without aid of my faithful horse, and good revolver, I would have lost my hair, the part of my body I feel most anxious about on the prairies."1
Phillips continued to work as a mail courier for the government, but when the army abandoned Fort Phil Kearny, he moved to Elk Mountain, west of the present day city of Laramie. There he supplied ties to the Union Pacific Railroad, then being constructed across southern Wyoming. In the decade that followed, he made his living by contracting with the army to furnish supplies and transportation at Fort Laramie and Fort Fetterman. On December 16, 1870, in Cheyenne, Phillips married Hattie Buck, a native of Crownpoint, Indiana, then 28 years old. The couple had several children, one of whom was appropriately named Paul Revere Phillips.
About the time of his marriage, Phillips established a ranch on Chugwater Creek as a base for his contracting activities. The ranch also accommodated travelers and served as headquarters for a small stock raising venture. In 1876, he built a hotel on the property, as travel had increased with the Black Hills gold rush. One acquaintance describes him as having a fine dairy herd and growing watercress's with diverted river water.
In 1878 he sold his ranch holdings and moved to Cheyenne, arriving on October 18. There Phillips remained until his death from nephritis on November 18, 1883. He is buried in Lakeview Cemetery. Hattie Phillips died in 1936 in a Los Angeles nursing home at the age of 94.
During a visit to Milwaukee in 1876, Phillips attended a parade in honor of General Grant, who was running for the presidency. Upon seeing the scout in the crowd, Grant stopped the procession and insisted that Phillips ride with him in his buggy. Although of humble origins and not particularly successful in life, Phillips was a national figure then and today he remains a symbol of courage and devotion to duty.


Then we drove to the site of the Fetterman Massacre site and we did have a cache there but from the end of the road it was almost a 1/2 mile walk to the cache through the fields and some other people had just come from that way and they said they ran into a huge bull snake so we decided not to venture out after it. We did walk around the site and read the boards about the fight. The Fetterman Massacre relates back to the Red Cloud War in the 1860's. Red Cloud's War (also referred to as the Bozeman War or the Powder River War) was an armed conflict between the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho and the United States in the Wyoming and the Montana territories from 1866 to 1868. The war was fought over control of the Powder River Country in north central Wyoming. European Americans had built the Bozeman Trail through it, which was a primary route to the Montana gold fields. The trail was used by an increasing number of miners, emigrant settlers and others, who competed with the Cheyenne and Lakota for resources and encroached on their traditional territory.
The United States named the war after Red Cloud, a prominent Oglala Lakota chief who led his band to oppose the U.S. military in the area. He was allied with the Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho bands. With peace achieved under the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868, the Cheyenne and Lakota achieved victory in this war. They gained recognized control of the Powder River country.
The discovery of gold in 1863 in the area of Bannack, Montana, created an incentive for white settlers to find an economical route to reach the gold fields. While some emigrants went to Salt Lake City and then north to Montana, pioneer John Bozeman and John M Jacobs developed the Bozeman Trail from Fort Laramie north through the Powder River country east of the Bighorn Mountains to the Yellowstone, then westward over what is now Bozeman Pass. The trail passed through the Powder River hunting grounds of the Lakota or Western Sioux. A second trail, the Bridger Trail, passed west of the Bighorns but was longer and therefore less favored.
The Powder River country encompasses the numerous rivers (the Bighorn, Rosebud, Tongue and Powder) that flow northeastward from the Bighorn Mountains to the Yellowstone. The Cheyenne had been the first tribe in this area, followed by bands of Lakota. As more of the northern plains became occupied by white settlement, this region became the last unspoiled hunting ground of the Cheyenne and various bands of the Lakota.
In 1865, Maj. Gen. Grenville M. Dodge ordered the Powder River Expedition against the Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho. Troops commanded by Patrick E. Connor defeated the Arapaho at the Battle of the Tongue River. The battle ended the Arapaho ability to wage war on the Bozeman Trail, but the expedition was unable to bring the Lakota to battle, and served as a forerunner for further conflicts.
In late spring 1866, the US government called for a council with the Lakota and Northern Cheyenne at Fort Laramie. Officials wanted to council to discuss a treaty to gain a protected right-of-way for emigrant settlers through the Powder River country, and also to establish military posts to protect the road.

While the conference was in session, Col. Henry B. Carrington, commanding the 18th Infantry, arrived at Laramie with the two battalions of the regiment (approximately 1,300 men in 16 companies) and construction supplies. He had orders to establish forts in the Powder River country using the 2nd Battalion of the 18th Infantry. The 3rd Battalion was to garrison posts along the old Oregon Trail, now the Platte Road. Carrington chose the 2nd Battalion because it contained 220 veteran soldiers consolidated after the American Civil War.
The U.S. peace commission bargained in bad faith with the Lakota and Northern Cheyenne. They offered annuities to alleviate near-starvation, but kept secret the US plans to build forts along the Bozeman Trail. Dull Knife (Morning Star) signed the treaty for the Northern Cheyenne.
Red Cloud, who attended the council, was outraged that the army was bringing in troops before the Lakota had agreed to a military road through the area. Red Cloud and his followers left the council in protest, never signing the treaty and promising resistance to any whites who sought to use the trail or to occupy the Powder River country.
Despite these warnings, Colonel Carrington marched into the Powder River country with 750 men (500 of them untrained recruits) and some 200 cavalry mounts received from the 7th Iowa Cavalry and 13th Nebraska Cavalry. The latter volunteer regiments had released their mounts, as the men were recently mustered out of service following the American Civil War. Carrington restored Fort Reno, leaving two companies there to relieve the two companies of the 5th U.S. Volunteers (nicknamed the "Galvanized Yankees") who had garrisoned the fort over the winter. Proceeding north, Carrington founded Fort Phil Kearny on Piney Creek, in what is now northwest Wyoming. From there two companies of the 18th advanced 91 miles to the northwest, where on August 13, they established a third post, Fort C. F. Smith on the Bighorn River.
Allied bands of Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho were under the leadership of Red Cloud. They attacked the troops at both Forts Phil Kearny and C.F. Smith. The Indians effectively closed travel on the Bozeman Trail. They regularly attacked parties gathering wood, mail carriers, emigrants and traders. Although 175 troops were assigned at both forts Reno and C.F. Smith, and 400 at Fort Phil Kearny, they were largely untrained. Carrington had sufficient manpower only to protect his posts and supply trains. He was unable to provide escorts to emigrants on the trail or to engage in aggressive operations.
Carrington was an engineer and political appointee, not experienced in combat. He spent manpower resources building fortifications rather than fighting Indians. This was due in part to his arrival in the region in mid-July, as he tried to prepare for winter. Given the severity of the Wyoming winters, this strategy was not unreasonable, but many of his junior officers, anxious for battle, were infuriated. Most were Civil War veterans, but they were unfamiliar with Indian fighting and believed the warriors could be easily defeated. They criticized Carrington's apparent unwillingness to fight Indians. Carrington respected the fighting capacity of his foes, their better knowledge of the terrain, and most importantly, their vastly superior numbers.
In November 1866, Captains William J. Fetterman and James Powell arrived at Fort Phil Kearny from the 18th Infantry's headquarters garrison at Fort Laramie to replace several officers recently relieved of duty. Unlike Carrington, Fetterman had extensive combat experience during the Civil War. He lacked experience fighting American Indians, however. Fetterman disagreed with Carrington's strategy. Reportedly he said it was "passive" and allegedly boasted that given "80 men," he "would ride through the Sioux nation." Carrington later reported Fetterman's boasts while trying to defend his own reputation.
On December 6, Second Lieutenant Horace S. Bingham, commanding Company C, 2nd Cavalry, was killed by Indians while driving off a force that had attacked a wood train. He had followed them as they retreated over Lodge Trail Ridge and been overwhelmed. Carrington worried about his officers' tendency to blindly follow such Indian decoy parties. Fetterman was outraged by what he considered the ineffectiveness of Carrington's leadership. He understood the commander of the Department of the Platte, Gen. Philip St. George Cooke, to have ordered the garrison to mount an aggressive winter campaign.
The battle near Fort Philip Kearney, Dakota Territory, December 21, 1866.
On the morning of December 21, 1866, the wood train was attacked again. Carrington ordered a relief party, composed of 49 infantrymen of the 18th Infantry and 27 mounted troopers of the 2nd Cavalry, to relieve the wood train. He ordered Captain James Powell to command the force, an officer who had led a similar effort two days earlier and declined to pursue Indians over the Claiming seniority by being a brevet lieutenant colonel, Fetterman asked for and was given command of the relief party. Powell remained behind. Another officer of the 18th, Lt. George W. Grummond, also a vocal critic of Carrington, led the cavalry. It had been leaderless since Lt. Bingham's death in early December.
Colonel Carrington stated he ordered Fetterman not to cross Lodge Trail Ridge, where relief from the fort would be difficult. Fetterman was joined by Captain Frederick Brown, until recently the post quartermaster and another of Carrington's critics. Carrington stated he told Grummond to remind Fetterman of his order not to cross over Lodge Trail Ridge. (The cavalry had to retrieve its mounts before it could follow and catch up with the infantrymen.) The relief party numbered 79 officers and men. Two civilians, James Wheatley and Isaac Fisher, joined Fetterman, bringing the total force up to 81 men. Instead of marching down the wood road to the relief of the wood train, Fetterman quickly turned north and crossed the Sullivant Hills toward Lodge Trail Ridge.
Within a few minutes of their departure, a Lakota decoy party including Oglala warrior Crazy Horse appeared on Lodge Trail Ridge. Fetterman took the bait, especially since several of the warriors stood on their ponies and insultingly waggled their bare buttocks at the troopers. Fetterman and his company were joined by Grummond at the crossing of the creek, deployed in skirmish line and marched over the Ridge in pursuit. They raced down into the Peno Valley, where an estimated 1,000-3,000 Indians were concealed. They had fought the soldiers there on December 6.
At approximately noon, men at the fort heard gunfire, beginning with a few shots followed immediately by sustained firing. The ambush was not observed, but evidence indicated the cavalry probably had charged the Indians. The cavalry's most advanced group was nearly a mile down the ridge beyond the infantry. When the Cheyenne and Oglala sprang their trap, the soldiers had no escape. None of them survived.
Reports from the burial party sent to collect the remains said the soldiers had died in three groups. The most advanced and probably most effective were the two civilians, armed with 16-shot Henry repeating rifles, and a small number of cavalrymen who had dismounted and taken cover in the rocks. Up the slope behind them were the bodies of most of the retreating cavalrymen, armed with new 7-shot Spencer carbines, but encumbered by their horses and without cover. Further up the slope were Fetterman, Brown and the infantrymen, armed with nearly obsolete Civil War muzzle-loading rifled-muskets. These foot soldiers fought from cover for a short while, until their ammunition ran out and they were overrun.
Carrington heard the gunfire and immediately sent out a 40-man support force on foot under Captain Tenedor Ten Eyck. Shortly after, the 30 remaining cavalrymen of Company C were sent dismounted to reinforce Ten Eyck, followed by two wagons, the first loaded with hastily loaded ammunition and escorted by another 40 men. Carrington called for an immediate muster of troops to defend the post. Including the wood train detail, the detachments had left only 119 troops remaining inside the fort.
Ten Eyck took a roundabout route and reached the ridgetop just as the firing ceased about 12:45 p.m. He sent back a message reporting that he could not see Fetterman's force, but the valley was filled with groups of Indians taunting him to come down. Ten Eyck suffered severe criticism for not marching straight to the sound of the battle, though doing so would have resulted only in the destruction of his force, too. Ten Eyck reached and recovered the bodies of Fetterman's men. Because of continuing Indian threat, they could not recover those of the cavalry for two days.
Carrington's official report claimed that Fetterman and Brown shot each other to avoid capture, though Army autopsies recorded Fetterman's death wound as a knife slash. It remains a subject of debate. The warriors mutilated most of the bodies of the soldiers; facts widely publicized by the newspapers. The only body left untouched was that of a young bugler, Adolph Metzler. He was believed to have fought several Indians with just his bugle. His body was left untouched and covered in a buffalo robe by the Indians. The reason for this remains unknown, although it may have been a tribute to his bravery. The battle was called the "Battle of the Hundred Slain" by the Indians and the "Fetterman Massacre" by the soldiers. It was the Army's worst defeat on the Great Plains until the disaster on the Little Big Horn ten years later.
Fort Phil Kearny prepared for a last stand that never came. General Cooke held Carrington solely responsible for the defeat and relieved him of command on December 26, 1866. (While Cooke had planned the relief with the conversion of the 2nd Battalion to the 27th Infantry, he ordered it immediately to make the point of rebuke to Carrington.) General Ulysses S. Grant, commanding the U.S. Army, was not inclined to blame only Carrington. He relieved Cooke on January 9, 1867.[4] Both an Army court of inquiry and the Secretary of the Interior conducted investigations of the massacre. The Army's reached no official conclusion, and the Interior's exonerated Carrington.
After a severe hip injury, Carrington resigned his commission in 1870. He spent the rest of his life defending his actions and condemning Fetterman's alleged disobedience. The shock of the Fetterman defeat resulted in public calls to reassess the government's Indian policy. Carrington's views came to be the most widely accepted. He placed culpability on reckless actions by Fetterman.
On the other hand, some critics [who?] have said that Carrington could have recalled Fetterman before the ambush took place. He could observe from the fort that the attack on the wood train broke off around 11:30. Also in mitigation, Fetterman may have believed that he had to support Grummond, even if the cavalry led the advance in violation of Carrington's orders. Given Grummond's record during the Civil War, he may have been far out in front.
Historians do not believe Red Cloud took part in the Fetterman battle. He was possibly present on August 2, 1867, for the Wagon Box Fight near Fort Phil Kearny.[citation needed] That day a small army detachment successfully used new breech-loading rifles to hold off more than 1,000 Lakota and Cheyenne for five hours. The Army had similar success in the Hayfield Fight the previous day.
While the Army had ordered Carrington to campaign against the Sioux and Cheyenne, his successor at Fort Kearny, General Wessels, never launched a major offensive against them. By late summer 1867, despite successes against the Sioux in the Hayfield Fight and the Wagon Box Fight, the government changed its policy. The administration decided that having emigrants use the transcontinental railroad, then pushing through southwestern Wyoming toward Salt Lake City, and the Bridger Trail, were better alternatives. They did not want to try to maintain an expensive and unproductive military presence in the Powder River country.
Peace commissioners were sent to Fort Laramie in the spring of 1868. Red Cloud refused to meet with them until the Army abandoned the Powder River strongholds, Forts Phil Kearny and C. F. Smith. In August 1868, Federal soldiers abandoned the forts and proceeded to Fort Laramie.
Red Cloud did not arrive at Fort Laramie until November. He signed the Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1868, which created the Great Sioux Reservation, including the Black Hills. The reservation covered what is now all of western South Dakota. Northern Cheyenne representatives also signed the treaty. They gained in the declaration of the Powder River country as unceded territory, to be used as a reserve for Cheyenne and Lakota who chose not to live on the new reservation, and as a hunting reserve for all the Lakota and Cheyenne.
Red Cloud became the only Indian leader to win a major war against the United States. He was more than a great war leader, however. His famous statement about treaties sums up his attitude towards the reliability of US negotiators: "I have listened patiently to the promises of the Great Father, but his memory is short. I am now done with him. This is all I have to say." He was always vigilant when dealing with US representatives.
After 1868, Red Cloud lived on the reservation. Seeing that the numbers of new emigrants and technology of the United States would overwhelm the Sioux, Red Cloud adapted to fighting the US Indian Bureau for fair treatment for his people. He was an important leader of the Lakota through the years of transition from their plains culture to the relative confinement of the reservation system. He outlived all the major Lakota leaders of the Indian wars. He lived until 1909, when he died on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Red Cloud was buried there.
Fetterman, Brown and the remaining US soldiers killed in the 1866 battles were reinterred at the U.S. National Cemetery at Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, near Crow Agency, Montana.


Then we were off a few miles down the road to the site of the Wagon Box Fight and another virtual cache. The Wagon Box Fight was an engagement on August 2, 1867, during Red Cloud's War between the U.S. Army and Lakota (Sioux) Native Americans in the vicinity of Fort Phil Kearny, Wyoming.
In July 1867, after their annual sun dance, bands of Oglala Lakota under Red Cloud and the other Powder River Sioux joined with Northern Cheyenne at their Tongue River and Rosebud River camps, where they resolved to destroy nearby Fort C.F. Smith and Fort Phil Kearny, against which they had been engaged for a year to prevent travel on the Bozeman Trail. Unable to resolve which to destroy first, the bands split into two large bodies, with approximately 500-800 Cheyenne and Sioux moving against Fort C.F. Smith and the rest, possibly including Red Cloud, headed to Fort Phil Kearny.
On August 2, 1867, Capt. James Powell with a force of 31 soldiers from the U.S. Army's 9th Infantry survived repeated attacks by one to two thousand Sioux warriors under the leadership of Crazy Horse and High Back-Bone and a smaller party of Cheyenne warriors under Little Wolf near Fort Phil Kearny, Wyoming Territory, along the Bozeman Trail. Red Cloud's presence at the battle remains in doubt. One of Powell's junior officers at the battle, Lt. John C. Jenness, reportedly saw Red Cloud at a distance through field glasses, but such an identification is questionable.
Powell's defenders, acting as guards for civilian crews cutting wood for the construction of the fort, had been sent out early in the morning. Two men went to look for game, but instead spotted a huge force of Sioux. Powell's men took refuge in a corral formed by laying 14 wagons end-to-end in an oval configuration. The battle lasted five hours, with Powell losing five men killed and two wounded. Powell reported killing 60 Indians and wounding 120 (although published accounts have put the number of casualties as high as eleven hundred). The disproportionate casualties, and the soldiers survival, was primarily due to the recent issue of Springfield Model 1866 "Trapdoor" .50-caliber breech-loading rifles, that had been supplied as a direct result of the Fetterman massacre. Indian attack strategy had been based on the long reloading time of muzzle-loading weapons. The fight lasted throughout the day until a relief force from Fort Phil Kearny finally arrived and the attackers withdrew.
The day before, on August 1, the second group had struck at Fort C.F. Smith and suffered an almost identical repulse in the Hayfield Fight. We walked through the interpretive trail and again read the many plaques about the fight and got the information we needed for our cache.


Then we drove to Story, WY, population 667, and 2 caches located at the Story Fish Hatchery which has been closed, from what we understand on and off for quite awhile now for remodeling. It was closed when we got there so we had to just take a picture for the virtual cache that we had there. Then we did walk over to find the traditional cache that was located in the picnic area for the hatchery which was outside the gates. Built from logs in 1907-08, the current hatchery is the oldest operating fish hatchery in the state. The original hatchery was built on Wolf Creek 20 miles north in 1906, but was moved to the current location due to its colder water. The hatchery building and water collection system was reconstructed in 1992, but still maintains the original redwood log siding. The main building also contains a large trough room where small fry are reared, an incubator room with three different types of incubation systems, an office and a shop.
An important feature of any hatchery is water. Normally, hatcheries and rearing stations will be built in locations where fairly constant water temperatures of 48-60o F are available from springs or wells promoting optimum growth for trout. At Story, however, water is drawn from South Piney Creek about one mile from the hatchery. Water enters fissures in the creek and travels underground through limestone formations before surfacing in a spring pond on the hatchery grounds. As a result, water temperatures vary from 35oF in winter months up to 57oF in the late summer and fall. Fish managers use the variation in water temperatures at Story to their advantage by utilizing the cold winter temperatures to slow the development of eggs to match timing for Wyoming hatcheries and also match the needs of other states who utilize the lake trout and Eagle Lake rainbow trout eggs taken from broodstocks at Story Hatchery. The colder water at Story hatchery is ideal for holding the only lake trout broodstock in the Wyoming state hatchery system.
Spawning is the act of egg laying by the female and fertilization by the male fish. At hatcheries artificial spawning occurs when hatchery personnel gently squeeze the abdomen of the fish and collect both the eggs from females and milt, or sperm, from males. The fish that are spawned are called the broodstock, which is a group of adult fish. Story spawns two species of fish, the lake trout and the Eagle Lake rainbow trout. Lake trout, or mackinaw, are spawned from late September through October. Approximately 1.2 million eggs are taken from the Story broodstock.
Story also produces between 100,000 and 200,000 splake. This fish is a cross between a male brook trout and a female lake trout. Splake are a popular fish among anglers in Wyoming. The Eagle Lake rainbow trout spawns from April until the middle week of May and produces around 1 million eggs.
Story hatchery has traditionally stocked from 200,000 to 300,000 fish each year. When wilderness stocking of lakes by helicopter occurs, usually every other year, larger numbers of small fish are raised to meet these needs. Historically, Story has stocked fish in the northern and northeast part of Wyoming in addition to stocking statewide to fill needs. Fish are hauled in specially designed tanks mounted on pickup trucks or on bigger tandem wheeled rigs for larger loads. These tanks provide oxygen in the water and aerate the water in the tank to break up carbon dioxide produced from fish respiration in the tanks. For helicopter stocking of fish specially designed tanks attach to the struts of the helicopter to allow for the stocking of several lakes in one trip.
Most fish stocking occurs during spring and early summer when the receiving waters are cool, and then again in the early fall months. Spawning operations and egg rearing occur October through December and again April through June. Sometimes eggs are brought in from other broodstocks in the state. Of course, egg and fish rearing are year-round activities at the hatchery.
With an average snowfall of from 9-10 feet, snow clearing becomes a major wintertime chore. Hatchery personnel also use this time to maintain and repair equipment and for compilation of reports. Summer brings along activities such as cleaning ponds and raceways after fish have been stocked to ready them again for fish. Maintenance of the buildings and grounds is a major part of work in summer months.


Well quite a day of history if we don't mind saying. After we left the fish hatchery and our last cache we headed back to Buffalo and the coach for the rest of the day. Well that's about all from Buffalo for today so until tomorrow we love and miss you all. Mom & Dad Dori & Dick