This is one of several stories in the 
August 2003 issue of  folio:

After a lapse of 146 years, Seminoe’s Fort is once again up and running. The long-disappeared Oregon Trail emplacement, on the old Tom Sun Ranch (now Handcart Ranch) has been rebuilt just yards southwest of the original site, and there is reason to believe that it looks just as it did when the handcart pioneers of 1856 struggled into its protection.

Front view of the reconstructed fort.
Sioux tipis are scattered over the site.

Here is some background: It was built just southwest of Devil’s Gate in 1852 by Charles LaJeunesse—not as a "fort," per se, but as a trading post, in an attempt by the old fur trapper to capitalize on the trade of the 50,000 emigrants who would pass that way that year. It was named Seminoe, in memory of his brother, Basil, whose French-Catholic baptismal name was Simono, or Little Simon. Basil, who accompanied John Charles Fremont in his western forays, was killed in Oregon by Modocs in 1846.

(A nearby interpretive panel cites Basil as the builder. It is in error.)

The inner courtyard. This cabin contains
artifacts unearthed from the original dig.

Charles also blazed the Seminoe Cutoff, which left the ninth crossing of the Sweetwater (now known as Burnt Ranch) to reach South Pass by a route thought to be easier than the original trail. (This route was misidentified as the "Seminole Cutoff" by Bob Berry and Don Buck in their ill-fated "Western Emigrant Trails Map.")

The fort was abandoned in 1855, when Charles took some gentle hints from the Sioux, who wanted to see him elsewhere. Not a big problem, as traffic on the Oregon-California Trail, which passed some twenty feet from his front door, had dwindled to next to nothing.

Charles was killed by the Arapahos on Clark’s Fork of the Yellowstone in 1865.

Shot from the site of the dig, this shows the southwest
corner of the reconstructed fort. The partially collapsed cabin demonstrates how the Martin party used some of the timbers for firewood.

The following year the Mormon handcart companies started coursing by the abandoned buildings, the last one being the remnant of the Martin company. Many of their members had died to exposure, hunger, and exhaustion, after an October blizzard hit them in the vicinity of present-day Casper. The LDS believes that some of the timbers from at least one of the cabins were removed for firewood, by the few who holed up in the remaining cabins. The rest of the company suffered, with a few more dying, in Martin’s Cove, about a mile to the northwest, and a few hundred yards west of the ground the church is frantically trying to acquire (which obviously is not the correct site) from the BLM.

This building represents the blacksmith shop, replicating the appearance of the fort after it was burned to warm the advance of Johnston’s army.

The state of Wyoming, helped by Jere Krakow’s Long Distance Trails office in Salt Lake City, undertook a geophysical archaeological investigation in May 22-26, 2001, and had no trouble in finding the fort site using magnetic gradient and ground conductivity surveys. The hayfield readily gave up its secrets, and the foundations of all the cabins were quickly exposed. There was lots of char—the Mormons burned the cabins in 1857, so they would be of no use to Johnston’s Army, heading west to depose Brigham Young and break the LDS power in Deseret.

Rail fencing has been erected to discourage pedestrian visitation of the site of the original dig. Gravel has been placed in the trenches along the foundations and charred corner posts of the original fort.

It was in that shape when Kathy and I last saw it. All the foundations, and even the stub of the flagpole, were exposed to the elements. We screamed at the authorities about this, as the destruction certainly would be swift and permanent.

Then we heard that the LDS, now aware of the importance of the fort to the handcart companies, was determined to reconstruct the buildings. Right atop the original foundations. So we screamed about that, too.

Enough of the original foundations have been left exposed.
Visitors may see but not touch.

Evidently there was a lot of other screaming as well, so the church rebuilt the fort to the precise measurements just to the northwest, and it is now open to the public. A cabin on the southwest corner of the site has a caved-in roof, as if from a snow load. Another arm of the U-shaped complex is in ruins and blackened, to simulate burning. The roofs are sod.

Levida Hileman, who has followed the reconstruction from day one, wrote, "As with anything the Mormons do with seemingly unlimited funds and manpower, the reconstruction is first rate. They have done all the buildings to the same size as the original."