On June 23-24, 1804, the Corps of Volunteers for Northwestern Discovery spent Saturday afternoon, the night, and early Sunday morning across the river from the bluffs that would, four years later, become the site of Fort Osage. On September 8, 1808, General William Clark, looking down those bluffs, wrote in his journal that he had examined the location in 1804 and was delighted with it then and equally so now. After the Corps concluded its mission with its return to St. Louis in September 1806, Clark was appointed Indian Agent for the Territory in March 1807. He returned to these bluffs, rendezvoused with Captain Eli B. Clemson and his company, and, with George Sibley and Rueben Lewis, began construction of Fort Osage. The government Indian Trade House was protected by Clemson’s troops quartered in the Redoubt, and the compound included four blockhouses, soldiers huts, and officer’s quarters, with a fifth blockhouse on the northern point of the bluff. The fortifications and adjacent buildings, gardens, and cropland made the fort a veritable Gibraltar of the Frontier. During September 1808, with the assistance of Nathan Boone, Daniel’s son, Clark concluded a treaty with Osage tribal leaders that persuaded them to cede much of their Missouri lands to the government on terms Clark later admitted were shamefully inadequate. At 9:00 in the morning on November 13, 1808, Captain Clemson dedicated the fort in military fashion and named it Fort Osage, as reported by George Sibley, the newly appointed government factor there. In 1825, Sibley served as one of the three commissioners on the U.S. Government Santa Fe Trail Survey. With the declaration of war with Britain in June 1812, both the military garrison and the Indian trade operations were temporarily transferred away from the fort. At the conclusion of the war in 1815, the fort was re-garrisoned and trade with the Indians reopened. By 1822, all U.S. Government Indian Trade Houses were closed because of pressure placed upon Congress by private fur companies. The fort finally closed in 1827, and area settlers salvaged its remaining lumber for dwellings in the future town of Sibley and on local farms. Fort Osage served not only as an important trading post for Indians but also as an important early departure point for travelers and pioneers heading west, before later upriver replacements at Independence and then the Town of Kansas, with newly established Fort Leavenworth nearby.
