On April 14, 1842, Captain B.D. Moore of the 1st Dragoons chose a ridge above a dry timbered bottom with a stream at its base as the site for Camp Scott and suggested naming the post for General Winfield Scott. From 1842 to 1873, Fort Scott played a significant part in events that helped shape the United States into a transcontinental power. Established by the U.S. Army in 1842 as part of a chain of forts from Minnesota to Louisiana, it was intended to guard the Permanent Indian Frontier; until 1853 its soldiers patrolled the plains, policed overland trails, contacted Indian tribes, and in 1846 provided troops for the Mexican War. In the late 1850s, after Fort Scott had become a town, it was caught up in the violent clashes of Bleeding Kansas between pro- and anti-slavery forces, and repeated unrest brought periodic returns of the army until Kansas entered the Union as a free state on January 29, 1861. With the coming of the Civil War, the Union Army made the Fort Scott area a supply base and training ground whose extensive facilities supported operations in Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, and Indian Territory, now Oklahoma. As railroads expanded westward, the army operated the Post of Southeast Kansas at Fort Scott from 1869 to 1873 to protect railroad building, with soldiers guarding construction workers from landholders seeking to block tracks from crossing their property.