Fort Snelling was home to several notable military units that left their mark on the fort's history. Following President Lincoln's call for troops on April 15, 1861, the First Minnesota Volunteer Infantry was among the first state regiments offered for Civil War service, and within two weeks 1,009 men mustered at Fort Snelling for duty. The regiment fought in several Civil War battles and is best known for helping hold the Union line at Gettysburg on the second and third days of the battle despite being vastly outnumbered by Confederate forces, in a battle considered a turning point in the war. The Third United States Infantry, the Army's oldest active-duty infantry unit, formed in 1784, was stationed at Fort Snelling in 1888 and moved into the new barracks at the Upper Post, remaining for twenty years and earning the nickname Minnesota's Own. It returned in the 1920s and 1930s to train for cold weather warfare and also entertained visitors with ceremonial parades, public band concerts, and horse shows featuring Whiskey, the Smartest Horse in the Army. From 1882 to 1888, Fort Snelling was also home to the Twenty-fifth U.S. Infantry, an all-African American unit known as Buffalo Soldiers, whose service was largely in the frontier west; at the fort its troops practiced, drilled, and paraded, and the regiment later served in the Spanish-American War, the Phillippine-American War, and World Wars I and II before the United States military was fully integrated in 1954. In autumn 1942, the Ninety-ninth Infantry Battalion, sometimes called the Norwegian Ski Troop, came to Fort Snelling, where it recruited native Norwegian speakers and Norwegian-Americans familiar with the language, ideally men who also knew how to ski, to prepare for operations against German forces in Norway.
