The fee is $3.00 for adults, $2.00 for children 6 to 12 years of age, and children under 6 years of age free. Interagency Annual Pass, Senior Pass and Access Passes are are accepted.
Fort Fees
Living History Encampment
Visit the 1840s with teachers, students and living history volunteers and staff perfecting their 19th century skills. The encampment, which begins in June, trains participants in presenting living history to the public. Event is open for the public to view ongoing demonstrations on Saturday and Sunday. Pre-registration is required for the full encampment (participation is limited).
Santa Fe Trail Encampment
The park’s main living history event again takes place in the fall, and this year celebrates the traders, tribes and travelers associated with the Santa Fe Trail. Their camps, set up near the fort, will be open for touring. All together over 60 living history volunteers bring the post back to life during this major event.
December: Holiday Celebration
Witness for yourself the joys, pleasures and pastimes of the 1840s at an isolated trading post. The spirit of the season comes alive with wagon rides, games, toy making and other holiday festivities. The event begins Friday evening with candlelight tours of the fort and continues all through Saturday culminating with another evening of candlelight tours.
Kid's Quarters
Seven to eleven year-old children are invited to "step back in time" and expericnce the life of a trapper, trader laborer, craftsman, or soldier. Kids learn and practice 19th cenbtury skills and expericne living history for themselves. Registration is required; for appliction materials call Bent's Old Fort.
Best Times to Visit
The area of the fort was designated a National Historic Site under the National Park Service on June 3, 1960 and a National Historic Landmark later that year on December 19. Archeological excavations and original sketches, paintings and diaries were used in the fort's reconstruction in 1976.
Reconstruction
For much of its 16-year history, the fort was the only major permanent white settlement on the Santa Fe Trail between Missouri and the Mexican settlements. The fort provided explorers, adventurers, and the U.S. Army a place to get needed supplies, wagon repairs, livestock, good food, water and company, rest and protection in this vast "Great American Desert". During the Mexican-American War in 1846, the fort became a staging area for Colonel Stephen Watts Kearny's "Army of the West".
For much of the 20th century there have been two main opposing theories for the 1849 destruction of the Fort. In his book Colorado (1889), George Bancroft attributes the Fort's demise to an attack by local indigenous tribes; "Bent's fort was also captured subsequently and the inmates slaughtered". This theory has since been largely discounted. Historians now lean towards the explanation that William Bent himself attempted to sell the Fort to the U.S. Army and, when he failed to extract a sum he felt the sale warranted he mined the fort with gunpowder and explosive charges and "blew it to pieces" on August 21, 1849. Certainly eye-witnesses who saw the fort after its abandonment tend to describe damage and destruction as being greater than would have been the case had the Fort simply fallen prey to abandonment and neglect.
Symbolizing America's expansion into the Southwest Bent's Old Fort is a National Historic Site near La Junta, Colorado. William and Charles Bent, along with Ceran St. Vrain, built the original fort on this site in 1833 to trade with Plains Indians and trappers. The adobe fort quickly became the center of the Bent, St. Vrain Company's expanding trade empire that included Fort St. Vrain to the north and Fort Adobe to the south, along with company stores in New Mexico at Taos and Santa Fe. The primary trade was with the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians for buffalo robes.
