Fort Buford, at the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers, is the site of Sitting Bull's surrender in 1881.
Three civilian wood cutters were killed at the mouth of the Yellowstone in December of 1866. Lieut. Hiram H. Ketchum with sixty men reacted, drove off the Indians and recovered the bodies with slight loss to his detachment. According to the regimental history, the Lakota boasted that they intended to annihilate the soldiers and during the winter they besieged the post. The siege cut off the garrison from the nearby Missouri River and forced them to sink shallow wells near their quarters in order to obtain fresh water. The shallow well water they drank was contaminated, by the post's livestock and/or human waste, and caused dysentery. From December 21-24 a large group of the Hunkpapas repeatedly attacked and captured the post's ice house and sawmill located near the river and opened fire on the post. The attackers were not repelled until Rankin ordered his two 12 pound Napoleons to return fire. Captain Rankin's wife spent the winter in camp, enduring the hardships and dangers with the troops in garrison.
The harassing raids and resulting lack of communication from the isolated post led to the perpetration of a hoax, the "Fort Buford Massacre", purporting that the fort had been wiped out, Capt. Rankin captured and tortured to death, and Rankin's wife captured and abused. The episode began when the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a story April 1, 1867, based on a letter allegedly written from the fort, which was then picked up and run the next day nationwide. It was given "legs" by a letter published April 6 in the Army and Navy Journal, attributed to the wife of a prominent Army officer, confirming the massacre. Although by April 4 many newspapers had begun to question the validity of the report, The Chicago Daily Times, Detroit Free Press, New York Daily Tribune, New York Times, and Boston Herald, among others, continued to feed the rumors with further stories for another month, many of them accusing the Army and the Johnson Administration of covering up the massacre. The hoax was eventually exposed by Rankin himself in correspondence to the war department.
The fort was subject to attack by Sitting Bull's forces until the early 70's. By 1872 the fort had been enlarged to such an extent that a perimeter stockade was not longer needed and most of the fighting had moved westward in the Montana territory.
The fort was decommissioned in 1895.