William Wells Bent (May 23, 1809 – May 19, 1869) was a frontier trader and rancher in the American West, with forts in Colorado. He also acted as a mediator among the Cheyenne Nation, other Native American tribes and the expanding United States. With his brothers, Bent established a trade business along the Santa Fe Trail. In the early 1830s Bent built an adobe fort, called Bent's Fort, along the Arkansas River in present-day Colorado. Furs, horses and other goods were traded for food and other household goods by travelers along the Santa Fe trail, fur-trappers, and local Mexican and Native American people. Bent negotiated a peace among the many Plains tribes north and south of the Arkansas River, as well as between the Native American and the United States government.
In 1835 Bent married Owl Woman, the daughter of White Thunder, a Cheyenne chief and medicine man. Together they had four children. Bent was accepted into the Cheyenne tribe and became a sub-chief. In the 1840s, according to the Cheyenne custom for successful men, Bent took Owl Woman's sisters, Yellow Woman and Island, as secondary wives. He had his fifth child with Yellow Woman. After Owl Woman died in 1847, Island cared for her children. Each of the sisters left Bent and, in 1869, he married the young Adaline Harvey, the educated mixed-race daughter of Alexander Harvey, a friend who was a prominent American fur trader in Kansas City, Missouri. Bent died shortly after their marriage, and Adaline bore their daughter, his sixth child, after his death.
Early years
William Wells Bent was born May 23, 1809 St. Louis, Missouri, a son of Silas Bent and his wife, Martha (nee Kerr) Bent. His father was later appointed as a justice of the Missouri Supreme Court. William was one of the Bents' eleven children. The first three were born in Charleston, Virginia, present-day West Virginia and the remaining children were born in St. Louis after the family migrated there.
His uncle (Martha Kerr's brother), James Kerr, served in the Missouri House of Representatives and Missouri State Senate and later led colonization, military, and political matters in Texas.
Three of William's brothers, George, Charles, and Robert, partnered with him in trading with Native Americans in the West. Robert and George died at Bent's Fort (1846 and 1841, respectively). Charles was the oldest son, born in 1799, and the remaining brothers were born in or after 1806. Later based in Santa Fe, Charles Bent lived in Taos. He served briefly as the first territorial governor of New Mexico.
Bent trading empire
Trapping, stockades and trading
Charles, George, Robert, and William Bent partnered in the fur trade with Ceran St. Vrain, also a St. Louis native. The city had several major fur trading families. They left Missouri about 1826 to explore what is now southern Colorado along the upper Arkansas River to trap for furs and establish a trade business. Within a couple of years, the Bents and St. Vrain had built two stockades, one near the present town of Pueblo, Colorado and the other stockade either at the mouth of the Purgatoire River, or on the northern side of the Arkansas River. The historian Grinnell suggested that William Bent was likely trapping furs before the first stockade was built. St. Vrain and his older brother, Charles, made the round trips to St. Louis, a regional trading center, to sell furs and return with supplies.
To set up their trading venture, the brothers used a legacy of their father, Judge Silas Bent. The brothers reinvested the substantial profits of their enterprise to develop their business.
Bent's Old Fort
thumb|300px|1845 Santa Fe Trail and native tribal lands
By around 1832, although possibly as late as 1834, the partners built a permanent trading post called Bent's Fort. The elaborate adobe construction could accommodate 200 people, and had been built on the northern "Mountain Route" of the Santa Fe Trail, by then open for business. The partners picked this location after discussions with the Cheyenne; It was the only privately owned, fortified installation in the west.
William and Charles Sometimes referred to as Fort William, the post was in "the perfect place at the perfect time"
The historian Anne Hyde has dated the moment when the Cheyenne chief White Thunder realized a common interest with Bent. In November 1833, they talked together as a meteor shower lit up the sky over the plains. Many Cheyenne believed that the celestial event was a signal of the end of the world; it was subsequently referred to as "the Night the Stars Fell". White Thunder saw it as a new beginning. He sought a truce with the Pawnee and the return of the four sacred arrows which they had captured in a battle with the Cheyenne earlier that year. To achieve this, White Thunder made a solo, unarmed visit to the Pawnee village to seek peace and returned with two of the arrows and an agreement. and he was known as Little White Man by the native tribes.
Life at Bent's Old Fort
thumb|250px|Bent's Fort in 1848
thumb|230px|Old Bent's Fort, Sketch by Lt. James Abert, published 1914
thumb|250px|A view from outside Bent's Old Fort (reconstruction)
The fort, and the area immediately outside it, comprised a multi-cultural, multi-lingual center with permanent inhabitants from many nations and visitors. Native tribes in the area for trading, such as the Sioux, Apache and Kiowa, as well as Comanche and Cheyenne also established temporary camps outside the fort. It was the hub of a trading area that encompassed a radius. It was also a stop each year for hundreds of wagons of European Americans traveling the Santa Fe Trail. Hyde writes in Empires, Nations and Families that
<blockquote>Bent's Fort was the one spot on the Santa Fe trail where exchanges with Indians were welcomed and encouraged, and the effects of those conversations on both sides were far-reaching ... archaeological evidence tells us that people sat in the courtyard together and smoked—a lot".