Just plan on an hour and a half. It'll likely take you that long and then some to get there. You can take 1-29, but if you've got the time, just cross over to Nebraska and go south on Highway 75--more scenery, less hustle. Do your soul a favor. Either way, you have to get to Blair to cross the river. When you do, hold on to that GPS because while finding the First Council Monument doesn't require what it must have for Lewis and Clark to get there, Ft. Atkinson is not Wall Drug.
One way or another, get to 75 in the middle of town and follow it to Fort Calhoun, even though you're looking for Fort Atkinson. Trust me. They're close. Turn left on Madison Street and watch the signs.
In 1804, neither Ft. Calhoun or Ft. Atkinson or even Omaha existed, but you're where you should be right now, standing on holy ground, the very place where Lewis and Clark finally, for the first time, July 30, 1804, met up with delegation of honest-to-goodness Native people, Otoes and Missourias, together because both tribes had taken horrible smallpox losses.
That meeting goes a long way toward determining why this facsimile fort--it is, a facsimile--is here. The meeting between the Corps of Discovery and their first bona fide Louisiana Purchase Natives is not the only big deal because Lewis and Clark had their wits about them as they moved up the Missouri, and what the found at this "council bluffs" was a promontory of such renown and reign that they determined, easily, it would be perfect for a fort.
That's why there is a Ft. Atkinson today. Jefferson listened to them, and if you followed directions, right now you're standing at an assembly of stiff metallic figures--some in uniform, some in blankets, and all very commemorative, sturdy enough to stand out there in prairie extremes, but, yes, facsimiles.
The real Ft. Atkinson was only here—right here! --for seven years, abandoned in 1827.
There's plenty of reasons for today’s Ft. Atkinson. Here's one you just might know. Once upon a time, an old trapper with a snowy beard got sliced up by a she-grizzly up north of the Black Hills. The mountain men he was with thought he was a goner and so abandoned him because the Rees were not thrilled with these white trespassers.
Amazing thing happened. Old White Beard didn’t die. He somehow pulled himself along through a couple hundred miles of treeless country, kept alive by eating bugs and grass and an occasional mouse. His strength slowly built up again, fueled as it was by a human emotion he could not stanch--rage. Old White Beard lived and breathed revenge. Hate was his lifeblood.
When that old man got to Ft. Atkinson, he met up with the kid named Fitz, the guy he was hunting, one of the two who'd left him out there alone to die.
When he got here, right here, to the ground beneath your feet, something no story of this guy gets particularly clear happened. Old White Beard, a man named Hugh Glass, did something nigh unto impossible for most of us. He forgave Fitz. He let him live. He did. I'm not pulling your leg. He forgave Fitz right here at Ft. Atkinson, and we've been telling his unbelievable story ever since, a story of indomitable human will, but also, right here at the Fort, an even better story, a story of forgiveness.
It's worth your time to visit. Seriously. It's holy ground.
