Fort Osage, four miles north, was the westernmost frontier outpost of the U.S. government until 1819 and one of 28 fortified Indian trading posts, or factories, operated on the Indian frontiers from 1795 to 1822 to promote and protect national expansion. In 1808, men of the U.S. Infantry and the Territorial Militia, directed by William Clark, began construction at this strategic point on the Missouri that the Lewis and Clark Expedition had named Fort Point, and the post was sometimes called Fort Clark. The Osage Purchase Line was set there in 1808, when the Great and Little Osages, summoned to settle near the post, ceded their land east of a line running south from the fort to the Arkansas and their claims to land north of the Missouri in return for annuities, trading privileges, and other considerations. Defended by blockhouses and a stockade, the post, with George C. Sibley as trader or factor, played an important part in opening the Louisiana Purchase to settlement and trade, served as a port of entry to the West for fur expeditions, and was the last outpost for the first successful expeditions to Santa Fe. The federal survey of the Santa Fe Trail began from Fort Osage in 1825, with Sibley as one of the survey commissioners. Among notable visitors were Sacagawea, Manda Chief Shahaka, fur traders Chouteau, Lisa, Henry, Menard, Hunt, Crooks, and Ashley, naturalists Bradbury and Nuttall, writer Brackenridge, and Daniel Boone, who rested there at age 82 on his last long hunting trip. Closed during the War of 1812, the fort was regarrisoned in 1815, then in 1819 its garrison was moved by the Army's Yellowstone Expedition, with Long's exploring party on the steamer Western Engineer, to a post at Old Council Bluffs. The government shut the fort down in 1822 and it was abandoned in 1827, after which Jackson County settlers used its timbers to build homes. In 1836 Archibald Gamble bought the site and laid out the town of Sibley in honor of George C. Sibley, and in 1941 Jackson County Court began a projected restoration of the fort as a monument to westward expansion, a project originated and sponsored by the Native Sons of Kansas City, Missouri.
