WHEN BEAVER SKINS WERE MONEY (continued 2)

Bent’s Fort long ago fell to ruins, but it has not been wholly forgotten. Up to the year 1868 the buildings were occupied as a stage station, and a stopping-place for travellers, with a bar and eating-house; but soon after that, when the railroad came up the Arkansas River, and stage travel ceased, the old post was abandoned. From that time on, it rapidly disintegrated under the weather.

In the autumn of 1912 I stood on this historic spot, still bare of grass, and marked on two sides by remains of the walls, in some places a mere low mound, and in others a wall four feet high, in which the adobe bricks were still recognizable. Here and there were seen old bits of iron, the fragment of a rusted horseshoe, of a rake, and a bit of cast-iron which had been part of a stove and bore letters and figures which could be made out as portions of the words “St. Louis, 1859.”

The land on which the fort stood was owned by a public-spirited citizen, Mr. A. E. Reynolds, of Denver, Col., and here within the walls of the old fort he has placed a granite stone to mark its site and to commemorate its history. He has given the land over to the care of the Daughters of the American Revolution to be used as a public park for the counties of Otero and Bent, Colo.

William Bent, whose life was devoted to the upbuilding of the Southwest, will always be remembered as the one who placed on that fertile and productive empire the stamp “settled.”