The number of buildings were twelve in all:  there were five sleeping-rooms, kitchen, warehouse, icehouse, meat-house, blacksmith shop, and carpenter shop.  The enclosed corral had a capacity for two hundred animals.  The corral was separated from the buildings by a partition, and the area in which the buildings were located was a square, while the corral was a rectangle, into which, at night, the horses and mules were secured.  In the daytime, too, when the presence of Indians indicated danger of the animals being stolen, they were run into the enclosure.

The roofs of the buildings within the square were close against the walls of the fort, and in case of necessity could be utilized as a banquette from which to repulse any attack of the savages.  The main entrance to the enclosure had two gates, with an arched passage intervening.  A small window opened from an adjoining room into this passage, so that when the gates were closed and barred any one might still hold communication, through this narrow aperture, with those within.  Suspicious characters, especially the savages, could do their trading without the necessity of being admitted into the fort proper.  At times when danger was apprehended from an attack by the Indians, the gates were kept shut and all business transacted through the window.

About thirty men were usually employed at Fort Laramie when the trade was at its height, as that station monopolized nearly the entire Indian trade of the whole region tributary to it.  There the famous frontiersmen, Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, Jim Baker, Jim Beckwourth, and others, who in those remote times constituted the pioneers of the primitive civilization of the country, made their headquarters.

The officials of the fur companies stationed at Fort Laramie ruled with an absolute authority.  They were as potent in their sway as the veriest despot, for they had no one to dispute their right to lord it over all.  The nearest army outposts were seven hundred miles to the east, and, like the viceroys of Spain after the conquest of Mexico, they were a law unto themselves.

In its palmy days Fort Laramie swarmed with women and children, whose language, like their complexions, was much mixed.  All lived almost exclusively on buffalo meat dried in the sun, and their hunters had to go sometimes fifty miles to find a herd of buffaloes.  After a while there were a few domestic cattle introduced, and the conditions changed somewhat.

No military frontier post in the United States was so beautifully located as Fort Laramie.  Surrounded by big bluffs at the intersection of the Laramie and Platte rivers, forming a valley unsurpassed in the fertility of its soil, together with the richness of its natural vegetation, it was an oasis in the desert.  The glory of the once charming place has departed forever.  It was abandoned by the government a few years ago, as it was no longer a military necessity, the savage tribes which it watched having either become tame or removed to far-off reservations.