William Bent

William Wells Bent was a frontier trader and rancher in the American West, with forts in Colorado. He also acted as a mediator among the Cheyenne Nation, other Native American tribes and the expanding United States. With his brothers, Bent established a trade business along the Santa Fe Trail. In the early 1830s Bent built an adobe fort, called Bent's Fort, along the Arkansas River in present-day Colorado. Furs, horses and other goods were traded for food and other household goods by travelers along the Santa Fe trail, fur-trappers, and local Mexican and Native American people. Bent negotiated a peace among the many Plains tribes north and south of the Arkansas River, as well as between the Native American and the United States government.
In 1835 Bent married Owl Woman, the daughter of White Thunder, a Cheyenne chief and medicine man. Together they had four children. Bent was accepted into the Cheyenne tribe and became a sub-chief. In the 1840s, according to the Cheyenne custom for successful men, Bent took Owl Woman's sisters, Yellow Woman and Island, as secondary wives. He had his fifth child with Yellow Woman. After Owl Woman died in 1847, Island cared for her children. Each of the sisters left Bent and, in 1869, he married the young Adaline Harvey, the educated mixed-race daughter of Alexander Harvey, a friend who was a prominent American fur trader in Kansas City, Missouri. Bent died shortly after their marriage, and Adaline bore their daughter, his sixth child, after his death.

Early years

William Wells Bent was born May 23, 1809 St. Louis, Missouri, a son of Silas Bent and his wife, Martha Bent. His father was later appointed as a justice of the Missouri Supreme Court. William was one of the Bents' eleven children. The first three were born in Charleston, Virginia, present-day West Virginia and the remaining children were born in St. Louis after the family migrated there.
His uncle, James Kerr, served in the Missouri House of Representatives and Missouri State Senate and later led colonization, military, and political matters in Texas.
Three of William's brothers, George, Charles, and Robert, partnered with him in trading with Native Americans in the West. Robert and George died at Bent's Fort. Charles was the oldest son, born in 1799, and the remaining brothers were born in or after 1806. Later based in Santa Fe, Charles Bent lived in Taos. He served briefly as the first territorial governor of New Mexico.

Bent trading empire

Trapping, stockades and trading

, George, Robert, and William Bent partnered in the fur trade with Ceran St. Vrain, also a St. Louis native. The city had several major fur trading families. They left Missouri about 1826 to explore what is now southern Colorado along the upper Arkansas River to trap for furs and establish a trade business. Within a couple of years, the Bents and St. Vrain had built two stockades, one near the present town of Pueblo, Colorado and the other stockade either at the mouth of the Purgatoire River, or on the northern side of the Arkansas River. The historian Grinnell suggested that William Bent was likely trapping furs before the first stockade was built. St. Vrain and his older brother, Charles, made the round trips to St. Louis, a regional trading center, to sell furs and return with supplies.
To set up their trading venture, the brothers used a legacy of their father, Judge Silas Bent. The brothers reinvested the substantial profits of their enterprise to develop their business.

Bent's Old Fort

By around 1832, although possibly as late as 1834, the partners built a permanent trading post called Bent's Fort. The elaborate adobe construction could accommodate 200 people, and had been built on the northern "Mountain Route" of the Santa Fe Trail, by then open for business. The partners picked this location after discussions with the Cheyenne; it was near La Junta and land occupied by the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes. It became an important center of trade, principally in furs but also in numerous other goods, including horses and mules. It was the only privately owned, fortified installation in the west.
William and Charles operated the fort in partnership with Ceran St Vrain, a fur trader who had already established significant trading contacts in New Mexico. Sometimes referred to as Fort William, the post was in "the perfect place at the perfect time" for someone looking to make money from trading. For example, the Bents could buy a gallon of brandy in St Louis for 2 and sell it at the fort for 25.
The historian Anne Hyde has dated the moment when the Cheyenne chief White Thunder realized a common interest with Bent. In November 1833, they talked together as a meteor shower lit up the sky over the plains. Many Cheyenne believed that the celestial event was a signal of the end of the world; it was subsequently referred to as "the Night the Stars Fell". White Thunder saw it as a new beginning. He sought a truce with the Pawnee and the return of the four sacred arrows which they had captured in a battle with the Cheyenne earlier that year. To achieve this, White Thunder made a solo, unarmed visit to the Pawnee village to seek peace and returned with two of the arrows and an agreement.
White Thunder also arranged a formal marital alliance between Bent and his daughter Owl Woman. He believed that their children would represent another element of the new beginning, of peace for the Cheyenne and the region. By this time Bent had learned the language of the Cheyenne, and he was known as Little White Man by the native tribes. When the Bents first met with the Cheyenne, the Indians gave them names in the Cheyenne language. The Bent brothers' respect for the Cheyenne protocols during the convivial occasion created a relationship base for their future development of the fort and trading.

Life at Bent's Old Fort

The fort, and the area immediately outside it, comprised a multi-cultural, multi-lingual center with permanent inhabitants from many nations and visitors. Native tribes in the area for trading, such as the Sioux, Apache and Kiowa, as well as Comanche and Cheyenne also established temporary camps outside the fort. It was the hub of a trading area that encompassed a radius. It was also a stop each year for hundreds of wagons of European Americans traveling the Santa Fe Trail. Hyde writes in Empires, Nations and Families that

Bent's Fort was the one spot on the Santa Fe trail where exchanges with Indians were welcomed and encouraged, and the effects of those conversations on both sides were far-reaching ... archaeological evidence tells us that people sat in the courtyard together and smoked—a lot".

Bent managed trade to and from the fort: he provided a safe zone in the area and a supply of goods for its store, as well as shipping buffalo robes back to St. Louis for sale. As many as 20,000 Native Americans camped near the fort in the fall for seasonal trading.
European-American travelers sometimes stayed for as long as three weeks at the fort before resuming their journeys. From fall through spring, the fort was busy with people coming to trade, and travelers resting and restocking supplies. The Bents had up to 100 employees, depending on the season, who had a variety of skills: clerks, guards, traders, teamsters, trappers, a tailor, blacksmith, carpenter and herders. Caravans took goods to trade with regional Native American tribes.
The fort was usually relatively empty during the summer months. During that period, Bent often made the six-month round trip on the trail to and from Westport, Missouri to trade the furs and goods gathered over the previous winter. He would purchase goods to replenish the stocks of the fort for the forthcoming hunting season. Westport Landing was an ideal terminus for the Bents' trade. Located on the Missouri River, it was a port for steamboats that hauled goods eastward to St. Louis. Sometimes five or six steamboats would be unloading goods for the Santa Fe trade at one time; dried buffalo meat, buffalo robes and furs would be loaded onto the boats for the return east. Westport was a boom town until a cholera epidemic in the mid-1840s reduced the town's population by 50%. In 1853 Westport was renamed Kansas City. While Bent and the pack trains were away, the fort managed with a skeleton crew of herders, clerks, traders and laborers for Native Americans and travelers.
William and Charles Bent had brought three slaves from St. Louis to work in their households: the brothers Andrew and Dick Green, and Dick's wife Charlotte, who served as a cook. In 1848 Charlotte Green described herself to George Ruxton as "de only lady in de whole damn Injun country". Her cooking won her a high reputation among the fur traders and travelers. One person called her a "culinary divinity". Bent's Fort held dances regularly; Colonel Henry Inman described Charlotte as "the center of attention, the belle of the evening. She knew her worth and danced accordingly."
In 1846 Bent was given the title of "Colonel" by the United States Army after supplying US troops and guiding them into New Mexico during the Mexican–American War. George and William Bent freed Dick Green for his heroic efforts in an Indian revolt in 1847 at Taos, during which their brother Charles was killed. Green had gone north with American soldiers to defend Bent's Taos home. He bravely led a skirmish against a group of Taos Pueblo and other warriors. Green was severely wounded but survived a trip back to Bent's Fort. Also allowing Charlotte Green to leave with her husband, the Bents gave her an informal freedom.

Bent's new fort

As the demand for furs declined, business dropped at the fort. An 1849 cholera epidemic among the Cheyenne took the lives of half the tribe, including Tall Woman, Bent's mother-in-law.
Bent wanted to build a new fort closer to Big Timbers, near the winter grounds for many tribes. Unable to agree on a selling price for the old fort, after removing his inventory of goods, Bent blew up and set fire to the old fort. In 1853 he established a stone fort in the Big Timbers area. Six years later, the US government purchased the new "Bent's Fort", renamed it Fort Wise and remodeled it for military use.