The Magazine:

Military posts used a magazine to store munitions, and at Fort Phil Kearny it was described as a sixteen-by-sixteen-foot structure with an eleven-foot dirt-covered ceiling, buried eight feet in the southwest quadrant of the parade ground. Numerous historical records referred to it: Carrington showed its location on his as-built map and created a design for its construction, Samuel Gibson marked it on his map of the fort, and Margaret Carrington placed it in the center of one of the squares. The magazine figured in accounts of Colonel Carrington’s constant frustration over shortages of munitions and ammunition at the post, a problem made stark after the Fetterman Fight when men guarding the stockade had only five rounds each. When Carrington left the fort on December 22, 1866, to recover the bodies of Fetterman’s command, he left secret instructions, later recounted by Francis Grummond, that if Indians attacked in overwhelming numbers during his absence, the women and children were to be put in the magazine and, in a last desperate struggle, all destroyed rather than captured alive. A 1999 archaeological study found no evidence of the magazine in the southwest quadrant as the historical records indicated, and its exact location remains unknown as one of the unanswered questions about Fort Phil Kearny.

Wyoming · United States