Wars bypassed Carson River outpost Fort Churchill

SILVER SPRINGS - While their Union colleagues fought Confederate troops in bloody battles thousands of miles away, troops stationed at Fort Churchill on the Carson River in Nevada territory fought mostly boredom.

Sure, they might head for the Idaho border to deal with Indian trouble. They might ride east to confront Southern sympathizers riling up miners in Virginia City.

But more often they marched back and forth on the fort's one-quarter mile parade ground in their sweaty blue coats.

"It was boring, very boring," said Paul Schmidt, supervisor of the Fort Churchill State Historic Park 40 miles east of Carson City. "That's why a lot of guys went AWOL or went over to Buckland and got drunk. There wasn't much to do."

Whiskey was readily available at the Buckland Station, a stage stop and hotel a mile away along the river. If soldiers got a pass, they headed to Virginia City, Schmidt said.

"They would get in fights and end up back in the brig. They would drink themselves unconscious and go AWOL."

Their diet just was just as boring, including salt pork, beans, bread and coffee, according to Schmidt.

Riding on 200-mile horseback expeditions wasn't pleasant either. Schmidt has a rock-hard saddle used by soldiers on display at the park, which gives visitors a glimpse of life for the 200 U.S. Army soldiers stationed there during the Civil War.

On occasional weekends at the fort, middle-aged men dress like Union and Confed-

erate soldiers and engage in mock battles. With a bit of coaxing, park rangers might even blast powder out of one of the 1,600-pound cannons.

Fort Churchill was built for $175,000 in July 1860, just a month after the second and final battle of the Pyramid Lake Indian War, and four years before Nevada entered the union as a state in October 1864.

The Indian war began in May 1860 after three white men at Williams Station, a Pony Express stop about 10 miles to the east, raped two teenage Indian girls. Their tribe responded by killing the men and burning the station.

Miners in Virginia City were outraged. Quickly 105 volunteers gathered and rode toward Pyramid Lake, expecting to rout the Paiutes and avenge the deaths.

Some of them probably were drunk and ill-prepared to fight, and the Indians hid in the brush and annihilated the volunteers, Schmidt said. Seventy-six died.

The call quickly went out to San Francisco for regular Army troops to put down the Indian uprising.

Capt. Joseph Stewart and hundreds of soldiers and volunteers that June got their revenge. Estimates are they killed as many as 160 Indians and lost two soldiers.

That proved to be the last major battle between Indians and soldiers in what became Nevada.

But no one knew at the time that the Indian wars in Nevada had ended.

Stewart was ordered to construct a military post along the Carson River to protect settlers, the Pony Express and the telegraph line. He named Fort Churchill after Gen. Sylvester Churchill, a hero of the Mexican War and the inspector general of the U.S. Army.

Unlike the Western movie forts with stockade walls, Fort Churchill consisted of

22 adobe-brick buildings around a rectangular parade grounds. Corrals for horses and cattle were built on the west side of the front.

With few fights with the Indians, soldiers at the fort spent their time arresting suspected Southern sympathizers. They were put to hard labor at the fort and not released until they signed an oath of allegiance to the Union.

Nevada was home to numerous military forts during the 19th century, including Fort McDermitt and Fort Ruby, both in Northern Nevada. Most were open for only a few years before being abandoned.

Schmidt said duty at Fort Churchill would have been pleasant compared with battlefields to the east. Soldiers there were dying by the hundreds of thousands, yet just one soldier was killed in battle during Fort Churchill's nine-year existence.

Neither Indians nor Con-

federates attacked the fort.

Still, 45 soldiers at the fort died of illness or injury.

Once the Civil War ended, the Army tried to give the fort to the state, but the offer was refused.

In 1869, Samuel Buckland, owner of Buckland Station, bought the fort for $750 at auction.

Timber in the fort was used to create a much finer hotel and stage stop that remained in use until the early 1900s. Ranchers later purchased Buckland Station, which was occupied by families until the 1950s.

In 1994, the state acquired Buckland Station and three large ranches along the Carson River.

Today the ranches and the station are part of a 3,200-acre Fort Churchill State Historic Park complex, and about 500 cattle still graze on the ranches.

Hikers who wander around the remains of the barracks, brig and other buildings may believe they are looking at the actual walls of the old fort.

The buildings are kept in a state of "arrested decay," according to State Parks Division brochures.

But these are adobe walls constructed by masons since the Civilian Conservation Corps renovated the fort in the 1930s and after Fort Churchill became a state park in 1957.

Schmidt said adobe bricks, made of sand or clay, mixed with straw and water, fall apart in a few years unless they are waterproofed.

"There is nothing here from the real fort because of rain, moisture and snow that degraded the adobe until there was noting left," said Schmidt, a former contractor. "Adobe was not a good building material unless they painted it."

From accounts of settlers, Schmidt said it is clear the soldiers whitewashed the buildings at the fort.

"The settlers mentioned they would come across the desert and then see these great big white buildings," he said.

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Information from: Las Vegas Review-Journal, http://www.lvrj.com