A Visit to Ft. Atkinson

Just plan on an hour and a half. It'll likely take you that long and then some to get there. You can take 1-29, but if you've got the time, just cross over to Nebraska and go south on hwy 75--more scenery, less hustle. Do your soul a favor. Either way, you have to get to Blair to cross the river. When you do, hold on to that GPS because while finding the First Council Monument doesn't require what it must have for Lewis and Clark to get there, Ft. Atkinson is not Wall Drug.

One way or another, get to 75 in the middle of town and follow it to Fort Calhoun, even though you're looking for Fort Atkinson. Trust me. They're close. Turn left on Madison Street and watch the signs. 

Soon enough, you're there--the real Council Bluffs--not that the hillside city of Council Bluffs is not. In 1804, neither Ft. Calhoun or Ft. Atkinson or even Omaha existed, but you're where you should be right now, standing on holy ground, the very place where L and C finally, for the first time, met up with delegation of honest-to-goodness Native people, Otoes and Missourias, together, people say, because both tribes had taken horrible losses from smallpox.

That meeting was a big deal and goes a long way toward determining why this facsimile fort--it is, a facsimile--is here. The meeting between the Corps of Discovery and their first bona fide Louisiana Purchase Natives is not the only big deal because Lewis and Clark had their wits about them as they moved up the Missouri, and what the found at this "council bluffs" was a promontory of such renown and reign that it would be perfect for a fort.

That's why there as and is a Ft. Atkinson. Jefferson listened to them, and if you followed directions, right now you're standing at an assembly of stiff metallic figures--some in uniforms, some in blankets, and all very commemorative, sturdy enough to stand out there in prairie extremes, but, yes, facsimiles. 

There's very little--if anything--left of the original Ft. Atkinson, but the place once buzzed with life, full of buffalo hides and beaver pelts, the bounty of the prospering fur trade up and down the Missouri, north to Canada, west to the Rockies. Lots of what you see around you looks like it was just erected--because it was. The real Ft. Atkinson was only here for seven years, barely an adolescent when it was abandoned in 1827.

It would have been little more than a mirage these days if locals hadn't been proud enough of its history to keep its memory alive. 

There's plenty of reasons for this wonderful facsimile fort. Here's one you just might know. Once upon a time, an old trapper with a snowy beard got eaten alive by a she-grizzly up north of the Black Hills. The mountain men he was with thought he was gone and so abandoned him because the Rees were looking for scalps. 

Amazing thing happened. Old White Beard somehow pulled himself along through a couple hundred miles of dangerous, mostly treeless country, kept himself alive by eating bugs and grass and an occasional mouse, his strength slowly building once again, fueled by an understandable human emotion he absolutely could not forget--anger. Old White Beard lived and breathed revenge. Hate was his lifeblood.

Listen to this--when that old man got here, to Ft. Atkinson, he met up with the kid named Fitz, the one he was hunting, one of the two who'd left him out there alone to die, even taken his rifle and knife. For months, or so the story goes, he'd fed himself on an exquisite dream: to kill the two campaneros who'd left him to die, his grave already dug beside him.

And when he got here, right here, to the ground beneath your feet, something happened, something no story of this guy gets particularly clear. Old White Beard, a old mountain man named Hugh Glass, did not kill Fitz, did not carry out the dream that fueled his unearthly crawl. 

Hugh Glass did something nigh unto impossible for most of us. He forgave Fizt. He let him live. He did. I'm not pulling you leg. He forgave Fitz right here at Ft. Atkinson, and we've been telling his unbelievable story ever since, a story of strength, courage and indomitable human will, but also, right here at the Fort, an even better story, a story of forgiveness.

It's worth your time to visit. Seriously. It's holy ground.