Two years after the fort opened, William Bent married Owl Woman - Mis-stan-stur - in a Cheyenne ceremony. She was the eldest daughter of White Thunder, the Keeper of the Sacred Arrows, the highest spiritual office in the Cheyenne nation. The marriage was not incidental to the business. It made William a son-in-law of the most important religious authority among the Southern Cheyenne, and it gave the Cheyenne a direct line into the trading post that handled their buffalo robes. Owl Woman moved between her father's lodge and the fort's quarters; William followed her people on the seasonal hunts. They had four children together - Mary, Robert, George, and Julia - all of whom grew up bilingual and bicultural. When Owl Woman died in childbirth in 1847, William married her sister Yellow Woman, following Cheyenne custom. The Bents were not anthropologists observing the Cheyenne; they had become kin.

The Cheyenne and Arapaho had been at war with the Comanche, Kiowa, and Plains Apache for a generation. The conflicts were over buffalo range, horses, and access to trade. The wars were costing all five nations in lives and in stolen herds, and they were costing the Bents in business - the southern tribes had stopped coming to the fort. In 1840, on the Arkansas River downstream from the fort, William Bent and his Cheyenne and Arapaho kin sat down with Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache leaders and negotiated a peace. Robes were exchanged. Horses were given. The fighting between the five nations largely stopped, and trade volume at the fort jumped accordingly. Historians of the southern Plains regard the 1840 council as one of the most important diplomatic events of the era, brokered without a single U.S. government official present. The peace held for decades.

The structure itself was 180 feet by 137 feet, with adobe walls fifteen feet high and four feet thick, raised by Mexican laborers who knew how to make bricks that would not melt in summer rain. Two round bastions guarded opposite corners. Inside the placita was a well, a forge, a press for compacting buffalo robes into bales, kitchens, storerooms, quarters for clerks and traders, and - famously, surprisingly - a billiard room. Charles Bent had hauled a billiard table across the Plains in pieces. Travelers from the East found themselves drinking whiskey under whitewashed adobe ceilings, surrounded by Cheyenne visitors and Mexican muleteers and French-Canadian trappers; the lingua franca shifted by the hour. Kit Carson worked here as a hunter. Susan Shelby Magoffin, an eighteen-year-old American newlywed traveling the Santa Fe Trail in 1846, wrote in her diary that the fort looked like a castle in a Walter Scott novel and that the cook served her ice cream.

Three things ended the fort, all at once. The U.S. Army marched west in 1846 to seize New Mexico in the Mexican-American War, and used Bent's Fort as a supply depot - turning a neutral trading place into an American military base in the eyes of the southern tribes the Bents had spent fifteen years cultivating. In 1847, Charles Bent, by then appointed first U.S. governor of New Mexico, was killed in the Taos Revolt by Pueblo and Hispano fighters who saw him as the agent of American occupation. The same year, a cholera epidemic moved up the trails from the gold-rush wagons heading to California, and in 1849 it ripped through the Cheyenne. Estimates suggest half the Southern Cheyenne died within months. Smallpox followed. The buffalo were thinning under hide-hunter pressure. William Bent, now the last surviving partner, tried to sell the fort to the Army. The Army offered insultingly little. In August 1849, William destroyed the fort himself - some accounts say he blew the powder magazine, others say he set it ablaze. He never explained why.

The site sits along the Arkansas River eight miles northeast of La Junta, Colorado, between cottonwood bottomland and short-grass prairie. The National Park Service rebuilt the fort in 1976 using historical paintings, archaeological evidence, and the recollections recorded in Susan Shelby Magoffin's diary; the reconstruction is faithful enough that the trade room, the council chamber, and the billiard room are all where they were. Living history interpreters in 1840s clothing demonstrate forge work, baking, and trade. The setting is the point: cottonwoods along the river, the Rockies just visible to the west on a clear day, the great empty grass running east toward Kansas. Pueblo Memorial Airport (KPUB) is sixty miles west. La Junta Municipal (KLHX) is closest but small. Combine a visit with the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site to the north - a related and much darker chapter in the story of the Cheyenne and the Americans, written fifteen years after the fort came down.