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Just west of Yukon,
Oklahoma
lies the old
Route 66
town of
El Reno,
Oklahoma. Built at the intersection of two historic highways – the Old
Chisholm
Trail and
Route 66, the town’s less than 20,000 residents are enthusiastic
Mother Road
boosters.
Before the town of
El Reno
was born, a man by the name of
Jesse Chisholm established the
Chisholm
Trail in 1866, where hundreds of herds of cattle would be driven north
from Texas
to Kansas
where they would be loaded on trains headed east. On top
of Concho Hill north of present day
El Reno,
the Caddo Springs Stage Station was established and soon became a
major stopping point between Wichita,
Kansas
and Fort Sill,
Oklahoma.
 In
the same year the
Cheyenne-Arapaho
Reservation was established by a treaty negotiated, in part by
Black
Kettle,
considered the greatest chief of the Southern
Cheyenne. Black
Kettle
was later killed by
General George Custer at the
Battle of the Washita on November, 1868
near the present town of Cheyenne,
Oklahoma. The
Cheyenne and
Arapaho
tribes were moved
from eastern
Colorado to land south of the
Arkansas
River. The Darlington
Indian
Agency was established in August, 1869 three miles north and two miles
west of present day
El Reno. The settlement and the agency took its name from Brinton Darlington,
the agency’s first superintendent. Soon, the
Cheyenne
Indian
School was established two miles north of Darlington in 1871.
In 1874, Fort Reno
was established to quell the unrest among the
Indians
in the region. First known as
the "Camp Near
Cheyenne Agency," the
location was later named Fort Reno in 1876 in honor of Major General
Jesse L. Reno, who had been killed in the
Civil War. The
soldiers soon built a stockade where Lieutenant
General Philip Sheridan
conducted his
Indian campaigns from headquarters established at the fort.
Fort Reno Panographic, 1891
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