History
Sherman Barracks, also known as Camp Sherman, was established in 1868 by Captain William Sinclair of the 3rd U.S. Artillery and named in honor of Lt. General William Tecumseh Sherman. It was located on an 82-½ acre tract four miles (6 km) north of Omaha and 1½ miles south of Florence. Pioneer entrepreneur Augustus Kountze sold land for the installation to the federal government. The following year the name was changed to Omaha Barracks. General Sherman was said to have complained about such a small site being named after him.
On December 30, 1878, the post was designated Fort Omaha. During this same time period, the U. S. Army's Department of the Platte was organized. The Fort was the Department's headquarters from 1878 to 1881. The post, however, remained home to upwards of ten companies of the 2nd Infantry until 1896 when the garrison was relocated to Fort Crook near Bellevue.
The Spanish-American War brought the Fort into usage as a muster point for troops from across Nebraska. Camp Meiklejohn, Camp Augur and Camp Vincent were all subordinate troop sites around Omaha under command of the Fort.
Fort Omaha is perhaps most notable as the site where Chief Standing Bear was held prior to the 1879 trial of Standing Bear v. Crook. Standing Bear, a Ponca chief, successfully argued in U.S. District Court that Native Americans were "persons within the meaning of the law" and had rights of citizenship. During the trial, Standing Bear was assisted by Susette LaFlesche Tibbles, a famous Omaha woman who was the daughter of Iron Eye, the last recognized chief of the Omaha. His lawyer was Andrew Jackson Poppleton, a pioneer Omaha attorney who held the position of general attorney for the Union Pacific Railroad. The trial was the most important of Poppleton's career. Both the fort's significant role in US military history in relation to the Indian Wars, and this important civil rights trial, contributed to the site's being listed as a historic district on the National Register of Historic Places.
In World War II Fort Omaha was used as a prisoner-of-war camp to house Italian Army soldiers captured in Europe.
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“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“The greatest horrors in the history of mankind are not due to the ambition of the Napoleons or the vengeance of the Agamemnons, but to the doctrinaire philosophers. The theories of the sentimentalist Rousseau inspired the integrity of the passionless Robespierre. The cold-blooded calculations of Karl Marx led to the judicial and business-like operations of the Cheka.”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)
“I believe my ardour for invention springs from his loins. I can’t say that the brassiere will ever take as great a place in history as the steamboat, but I did invent it.”
—Caresse Crosby (1892–1970)