Tuesday, July 9, 2013

7/8 Fort Robinson State Park, NE

Fort Robinson has a very interesting history.  It has been an Indian agency, cavalry fort, breeding and training center for horses after WWI, training center for dogs after WWII, prisoner of war camp during WWII, Olympic equestrian training center, department of Agriculture station for Nebraska, and finally a state park in the mid-1950s. 

It has a hotel with fine dining restaurant, rental cabins, campground, indoor swimming pool, extensive stables and pasture land, tours, two museums, numerous historical building open for visiting, tennis courts, and a lot more.  You can rent one of the old officer quarter homes or one of the smaller buildings that were converted to residential use, or even a large building that will sleep 60 people in multiple bedrooms and having 14 bathrooms!  You can also sign up for trail rides on horseback or take a jeep tour of the nearby countryside. 

Here are some photos of the fort.  Keep in mind that only a few of the original buildings remain and that this would have looked like a small city 80 years ago.








 
This is the hotel and main registration office for the campground.  The main restaurant is also located in this building.

At one time, they had as many as 3,000 horses stabled here.  Only a few of the original stable buildings remain, but they can still stable several hundred horses, if needed.  They also had a fully staffed veterinary center to service all the animals.  It is now the café and bike rental office, but I did not take a photo of it.

One of the most interesting facilities here is the Trailside Museum which is owned and staffed by the University of Nebraska.  It contains fossils that were found nearby.

This is a three-toed horse.

And this is a Columbian Mammoth, which was bigger and had longer tusks than the Woolly Mammoths.

These two male Columbian Mammoths each had one broken tusk, which enabled them to become locked in battle.  They died that way and both skeletons are displayed here as they were when they were discovered near this fort. 

Here are a couple of articles, I found about this discovery:

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