Time Team America: Fort James

The Plains Indian Wars (1865-1891) were a response to the great expansion by the United States westward of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Supposedly, much of that region had been bought by the U.S. from the French in the Louisiana Purchase—but in fact the land was still owned and occupied by the Dakota Sioux and many other Plains tribes. Regardless of that residency, and encouraged by their government, European-Americans continued to push westward, and beginning in the late 1850s, the Sioux and associates began to fight back against the encroaching settlements.

After the Civil War ended, the U.S. government sent soldiers out to the Great Plains to protect the settlers. The best known battle of the Plains Indian Wars is the Battle of the Little Bighorn (1876), in which George Armstrong Custer's troops lost in a big, messy way to the gathered families led by Hunkpapa Lakota chief Sitting Bull. There were many other battles—much of what passes for the "old west" in Hollywood is derived from this period in history— and the Plains Indian Wars ended in 1891, after the assassination of Sitting Bull and the massacre at Wounded Knee.

Fort James, located on privately owned property near what today is Mitchell, South Dakota, was built in 1865, with its walls built of the locally available (and lovely) rose pink quartzite. By the time the fort was built, most of the Sioux had moved away from the area, and the fort was decommissioned after 11 months, and burned to the ground in 1868. The fort saw no battles in the Plains Indian Wars, and the men were moved to other forts. Little documentary evidence exists and no previous excavations have been led there, but the foundations, where they weren't completely robbed for new construction elsewhere, are intact and buried under a varied depth of wind-blown soils.

Time Team America at Fort James

PBS’ TIME TEAM AMERICA excavates the corner of a frontier fort built by the U.S. Cavalry in 1865 to protect settlers in what is now South Dakota.
Photo Credit: Doug Brazil

As we have come to expect, this Time Team America episode uses excavation and several remote sensing techniques to identify the outlines of the fort and investigate the fort's barracks, a possible privy and what may be the horse stables. Interestingly, a visually clear "geofizz" result (clear to us non-specialists anyway) is the horse stable, which shows up distinctly on the "geofizz" results but apparently has a less visual subsurface presence.

Additional information is gathered for the program from Mike Fosha of the South Dakota State Archaeologist's Office, and Richard Fox, identified as a "fort expert" but best known for his pioneer battlefield archaeology at the Little Bighorn Battle site. Local historian Tom Kilian weighs in with his opinions about who burned down the fort; stone mason David "Squeaks" Farrar gives Jeff a lesson in splitting quartzite;, and re-enactors Mick Nesseim, Kevin Gansz and Bill Hoskins give some highlights about the life of a mid-19th century cavalry man.

What's missing, of course, are the Sioux and Euro-American settler sides of the story; at a guess (I hope) Sioux historians were asked but decided not to participate, and there was only so much time to cram so much information about such a complex issue into sixty minutes anyway.

TIME TEAM AMERICA at Fort James, South Dakota
Photo Credit: Doug Brazil

Bottom Line

There's a lot to like about this episode. There's no rain, although it is dusty out there on the plains, and there is actually bits of the foundation to look at. The story is, of course, too complex to cram into an hour—I think that could be said about any documentary about an ongoing archaeological excavation. At the end you'll see a very nice computer reconstruction of the fort based on Colin Campbell's drawings.

As the first season closes, I am so glad that the U.S. finally got its own Time Team. In the true tradition of reality TV, field conditions are never ideal; the excavations sometimes come up empty; and original interpretations turn out to be incorrect. The team is a little uncomfortable as yet, but they seem to be warming to the task. It certainly is true that, in the interest of time, some heavy equipment, such as backhoes, gets introduced onto the sites without a lot of explanation about the sticky decision to use it. And there are other issues that could be addressed in better detail; but on the whole, Time Team America is a welcome addition to public archaeology. The series works best as an introduction to the complexities of fieldwork, rather than a comprehensive discussion of the whole nine yards.

One thing I haven't said much about are the additional materials that have been posted on the PBS website, including current information about the excavations (the series was filmed during the summer of 2008), a weblog and commentary from the Time Team members. Very valuable resources indeed.

• PBS: Time Team America: Fort James, where you can watch the video starting on August 6th
• About.com: Resources and Web Links for Fort James episode of Time Team America, includes links to Plains Indian War resources, official tribal websites, bottle identification, reenactments, etc etc
• Time Team on About.com

Comments

August 5, 2009 at 9:28 pm

(1) Blaine Olson says:

Gentlemen:

Just by chance I watched PBS tonight, and found this documentary very intriguing. I agree with your commments above, that due to time limits; they had to skip some details that some of us viewers would have welcomed.
Because of my interest in the program, at the close I went directly into the Internet, to see if I could find more information—and right off found your article. It confirms very accurately what I viewed tonight; and thank you for your service. I am happy to respond. I live in De Soto, MO; 35 miles South of St. Louis. Thank You.