Camp Nichols

Kit Carson’s post on the worst stretch of the Cimarron Cut-off

In June 1865 Colonel Christopher Carson, the scout everyone called Kit, put soldiers to work building a stone-walled post in the dry country that is now Cimarron County, Oklahoma. It was the only man-made structure on the Cimarron Cutoff of the Santa Fe Trail while that route was running, and it sat roughly halfway between Fort Union in New Mexico and Fort Dodge in Kansas, far from help at either end.

The Oklahoma Historical Society describes the shape of it plainly. About forty thousand square feet enclosed by walls of native stone. Inside, three hundred California and New Mexico troops living in dugouts and tents, with a stone commissary and a stone hospital. Officers quartered outside the walls. Some of the officers and enlisted men had their wives with them. It may have been named for Captain Charles P. Nichols of the First California Cavalry.

The work was escort duty. Wagon trains came up from Fort Union every two weeks, troops took the caravans on toward the Kansas forts, then turned around and guided the westbound traffic back. It was not a fort in the sense of a siege. It was a relay station with walls, built because the Kiowa and Comanche had every reason to contest that road and frequently did.

Then it was over. Occupied from June to November of 1865 and abandoned. The post that mattered enough to build in stone lasted a single season.

It went onto the National Register of Historic Places in 1966 as NR 66000628, and here is the part to take seriously: it is on PRIVATE PROPERTY and there is nothing standing. Tumbled stone in a pasture. This is a pin for the map and for the story, not an invitation to walk in. If you want to stand on the Cimarron Cutoff, there are stretches of it in public hands elsewhere along the route, and the ruts are still visible in more places than you would expect.