Summer 2017, Day 22: Bent’s Old Fort NHS, Amache, Sand Creek Massacre NHS, Monument Rocks

Good morning from Walmart:

Our first stop was Bent’s Old Fort National Historic Site. Like Fort Union Trading Post, which we visited on Day 10 of this trip, this fort was built in the early 1830s to facilitate trade with local Native Americans. The current fort is a recreation built by the NPS, built out of adobe like the original:

The grave of a wagon driver:

The original fort had a variety of animals:

A peahen and her chicks:

Our next stop was the Granada War Relocation Center, also known as Camp Amache. Built during World War II in response to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Amache was one of ten Japanese American internment camps used to imprison over 100,000 US residents of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of whom were US citizens. This is the fourth internment camp we’ve visited:

It’s always sobering to explore these camps. It’s frightening to think how quickly constitutional rights can be stripped away.

Only one building remains of the over 500 buildings once here, most of them barracks:

The foundations of the barracks remain:

Remains of the water reservoir:

Roads, now empty, extend in all directions:

The vault for the coop store is only building still standing:

Standing inside one of the barracks:

Our next stop was Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site. It was here in 1864 that US Army massacred a Native American peace camp. Most of the dead were women and children. One of the survivors of the massacre, Chief Black Kettle, was later killed by Army forces at a peace camp at Washita, which we visited on Day 974.

The visitor center was one of the smaller ones we’ve visited. It’s little more than a contact station, with no exhibits: