Fort Reno grew out of the U.S. Army's 1868 winter campaign on the Plains. After years of unsuccessful summertime pursuit of Plains Indians, General Sherman adopted a winter strategy because severe weather made all tribes less mobile, and he chose General Sheridan and Col. Custer of the 7th Cavalry to lead the effort to force hostile Plains tribes onto reservations. To support the campaign, Camp Supply, later Fort Supply, was built as a supply depot. Custer left Camp Supply on November 23, 1868, in a blinding snowfall while Sheridan remained there, and the first winter camp his troops found was that of Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle. After the engagement, Custer took many captives back to Camp Supply, but because no provisions had been made for captives and no Cheyenne/Arapaho Reservation yet existed, the Darlington Agency was hurriedly established and the captives were transferred there, joined by other Indians forced into reservation life. Because the major reservations then required supporting military forts, Fort Reno was established. Soon after the Black Kettle and Battle of the Washita engagement, a larger force returned to the Washita site and then fought Comanche, Kiowa, and other hostile tribes near present-day Lawton; in similar fashion, Sheridan established Fort Sill and a new reservation nearby, and Fort Sill ultimately replaced Ft. Cobb. Later, on September 9, 1878, more than 350 Indians led by Chiefs Dull Knife and Little Wolf fled the Darlington Agency and passed through Kansas and Nebraska in an attempt to return to their northern home while cavalry posts pursued them. The old post cemetery dates to the fort's origins and includes the graves of Chief of Scouts Ben Clark and his Cheyenne wife. Fort Reno became a remount station operated by the Quartermaster Corps on May 25, 1908, and its next 33 years of peacetime operations were relatively stable. With the beginning of World War II, the Army reactivated three remount stations, including Fort Reno, and horse cavalry still played a role in the war's early years because developing, equipping, and training the first American Tank Corps took two to three years. During that period, thousands of horses and mules were bought, trained, and shipped mainly to the Italian Mountain Campaign and to Burma. During World War II, a German and Italian prisoner of war camp was also built at Fort Reno, run by military police, and deceased prisoners were buried in the old post cemetery area. In July 1948, the fort became a grasslands and livestock experiment station operated by the US Department of Agriculture and Oklahoma State University.