New Relationships
The construction of Bent's Old Fort cast the beliefs and values of the modern world into material form. It became a kind of "medicine lodge" for the ritual behaviors—and the material symbols associated with these rituals—that served to established the new ideology in the Southwest. We can see in Bent's Old Fort the "calcified ritual" of Yi-Fu Tuan and in the history of the fort the results of that ritual. One result was the very definite class hierarchy that arose with the construction of the fort: company owners at the top, other free traders next, then trappers, then Mexican laborers, and, at the bottom, the Native Americans. Among the Native Americans, though, the Cheyenne and the Arapaho held by far the highest status, evidenced in part by the fact that they were sometimes admitted inside the fort. Other Native Americans were never permitted inside the boundaries of the fort's walls. The fort served as a "model," if you will, of the new systems of control introduced by the Anglos, but it also functioned to implement those controls. It provided a paradigm for what amounted to the industrialization of the southwestern Plains and, later, of the Southwest.
But the fort was not introduced into a cultural vacuum. Native American and Mexican groups protected and advanced their interests in strategic ways. A visitor to the Southwest today can see what was accomplished by their maneuvering: a modern society that displays a unique combination of Hispanic, Native American, and Anglo cultural traits. It is also a society in which dialogue among groups of different cultural backgrounds and resistance to cultural homogenization commonly occur.
Figure 8.
Bent’s Fort, as drawn by Lieutenant J. W. Abert in his
“Journal from Bent’s Fort to St. Louis in 1845." (Courtesy
Colorado Historical Society, Denver, file #26318;
Senate Doc. 438,29th Cong. 1st sess.)