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Fort Mackenzie (Wyoming)

Construction NOTES: 1. Mackenzie spelled without any cap K. 2. See how References and Notes used in Ranald Slidel Mackenzie Wikipedia article. References list major resources which are texts, and Notes provide citations to the texts, using the author's name.

The following is a copy of material copied verbatim from the following web citation.

On the northwest edge of the city of Sheridan is Fort Mackenzie, a hospital administered by the Veterans Administration. The hospital is situated on approximately 272 acres of land, which is a small parcel compared to the 6, 280 acres that once was the Fort Mackenzie military reservation. Within that acreage are approximately seventy buildings and structures, most of which are arranged in two north-south rows and along a fishhook-shaped avenue. Two-thirds of the buildings within the hospital grounds were constructed in the first decade of the twentieth century when Fort Mackenzie was a military post. These buildings served various functions such as administrative offices, living quarters, hospital wards, warehouses, and maintenance shops. They are constructed of red brick in the colonial style. The rest of the hospital structures, built after 1930 and during the years the post served as a Veterans Hospital are complimentary in style and construction materials to original fort buildings. Fort Mackenzie was converted from a military post to a veterans hospital in the early 1920s. Fort Mackenzie was named for Ranald Slidel Mackenzie (1840-1889), veteran of the Civil War and the Indian Wars of the West and Southwest. As colonel of the Fourth Cavalry, Mackenzie took part in the Powder River Expedition of 1876. In November of that year, leading a mounted column during General George Crook's winter campaign against High Plains Indians, he surprised and defeated Chief Dull Knife's band of Northern Cheyenne near the edge of the Big Horn Mountains. Fort Mackenzie was established as a military base for the purpose of protection of white settlers in a Rocky Mountain-High Plains region home to Indians belonging to half a dozen different tribes. In September, 1898 Charles F. Manderson, a former senator from Nebraska, and others, informed the War Department of the need for a military post in the Northwest and recommended Sheridan, Wyoming as a site. In October, 1898 General E. V. Sumner, Commander of the Department of the Colorado and the Missouri, was directed by the War Department to investigate and report upon the matter of establishing a military force at Sheridan. In his report Sumner supported Manderson's claims and on December 14, 1898, the Secretary of War approved the report and authorized the expenditure of $12,000 for temporary buildings at Sheridan. Legislation was introduced which called for the establishment of a post near Sheridan and included a $100,000 appropriation. The bill was signed by President McKinley on April 7, 1900. The garrison was at its peak strength with 601 men in 1911. Fort Mackenzie's usefulness as a military post was at an end with the entry of the United States in World War I in 1917. The post was officially abandoned on November 3, 1918.

The fort was transferred from the War Department to the Public Health Service in March 1921. A year later it was transferred from that agency to the Veterans Bureau. In March 1922 President Harding signed a deficiency appropriation bill containing an item of $100,000 for use in converting the post to a hospital, and that spring the first patients began to arrive at Fort Mackenzie Veterans Hospital. When the hospital opened it had a bed capacity of 125 patients. At peak patient load just after World War II, the hospital contained 900 patients and was one of the largest neurophychiatric hospitals in the country. At the time of its nomination to the National Register of Historic Places, the hospital had an operating bed capacity of 364, a staff of 505 and a budget of $10,000,000.

The significance of Fort Mackenzie as a historic site derives from both its history and its architecture. Its history relates to two major functions: its function as a military post and as a veterans hospital. From 1898 to 1916 Fort Mackenzie was an army post, but it is not clearly understood what role it played in American military history. That it had an active role in the High Plains Indian Wars is doubtful, since fighting had ceased and Indians were located on reservations two decades before the post was established. Wyoming's congressional delegation tried to establish it as a regimental post, but that effort was likely inspired more by economic and political, rather than military reasons. The existence of the many buildings and structures at Fort Mackenzie affords physical evidence of the impact the fort has had upon the lives of those associated with the facility. The dozens of red-brick colonial style buildings form an impressive complex that is equaled or surpassed only by F. E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne and Fort Yellowstone at Mammoth, as a homogeneous collection of historic federal buildings in the state.

Fort Mackenzie named for Ranald Slidell Mackenzie

This is a first draft - needs citations and perhaps shortening.

The fort was named for Ranald Slidell Mackenzie (1840-1889). He graduated from West Point in 1862, when the American Civil War was already one year underway, but in the ensuing three years he was wounded six times and received seven brevet advances of rank, eventually becoming a brevet brigadier general in command of the Cavalry Division of the Army of the James. A serious hand injury during the siege of Petersburg cost him two fingers on his _____ hand, and led to his nickname "Bad Hand".

After the war Mackenzie remained in the regular army but reverted to a lower permanent rank of colonel of the 41st U.S. Infantry, an African-American Regiment of Buffalo Soldiers. Mackenzie did well with the 41st and on February 25, 1871 he took command of the 4th U.S. Cavalry. Mackenzie spent the rest of his career on the Frontier, engaged in the Indian Wars. He led the 4th Cavalry primarily in the southwest against the Comanches and Kiowas. Devoted to duty and discipline, he rigorously led the 4th Cavalry against Kiowa and Comanche, until both tribes were reduced and required to accept re-location from the high plains of the southwest to reservations on Oklahoma Indian Territory. Promoted to brigadier general in 1881, and assigned to the Department of Texas he began to demonstrate increasingly odd behavior, attributed at the time to a head injury suffered when he fell from a wagon. He was retired from the army on March 24, 1884 for "general paresis of the insane".(Need citation) and died five years later in 1889, and was buried at West Point.

Mackenzie took part in 1876 military activities in Wyoming close to the Sheridan area. The defeat of Custer's 7th Cavalry at the Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876 in Montana Territory generated a massive military response against the Cheyenne and Sioux. Mackenzie took part in General Crook's Powder River Campaign designed to find and inflict loss on bands who were in their winter camps in their vast hunting preserve between the Big Horn Mountains and the Black Hills. On November 25, 1876, 1000 troopers from the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th United States Cavalry Regiments under the leadership of Col. Mackenzie attacked a band of about 400 Cheyenne (sometimes referred to as "Dull Knife's village") in their winter camp on the remote reaches of the Red Fork of the Powder River in Wyoming. The army surprised and scattered the Cheyennes driving men, women and children out of their village into subzero temperatures and snow on the open prairie. This attack effectively broke the will of the "Dull Knife" band and other Cheyenne bands to offer further resistance. The site of the "Dull Knife Fight" is on the east edge of the Big Horn Mountains, at the canyon mouth of the Red Fork of the Powder River, about 75 miles south of Sheridan.

See Also

Ranald S. Mackenzie

External Links

• "Fort Mackenzie", Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office, State of Wyoming. Descriptive one page summary from the National Register of Historic Places. Contains a digital slide show of black and white photos of many of the original buildings that remain at Fort Mackenzie in its current role as VA Hospital.
• Fort Mackenzie. National Register Of Historic Places Records, Nomination Form, 27 Pdf pages, with original material (historic, geographical, descriptive) provided to the NRHP to support the inclusion of Fort Mackenzie on the National Register of Historic Places.