A little known final chapter in the Indians vs. U.S. Cavalry story occurred 16 years after Wounded Knee! In 1906 Ft. Meade's cavalry helped capture 400 "renegade" Ute Indians. These Indians had abandoned their ever-shrinking Utah reservation to seek a better life and possible alliance with South Dakota's Sioux.

    The Utes embarked on a strange odyssey through Utah, Wyoming and Montana. They caused little trouble, other than alarming ranchers by subsisting on beef cattle. But bloodshed was anticipated. Cavalry troops from Ft. Meade and three other forts were dispatched to bring the Utes to Ft. Meade. The Indians and soldiers made a caravan two miles long, which snaked through the streets of Belle Fourche and Sturgis. School was dismissed for this "parade."

    The Utes were instructed to camp at a site across from the present Black Hills National Cemetery and there they remained as virtual prisoners for eight months. In 1907, an effort was made to relocate the Utes on a corner of the Cheyenne River Reservation near Thunder Butte.

    Forty years later, another group of prisoners was detained at the Fort. Two hundred troops of General Rommel's African Corp were brought there to work in the sugar beet fields around Belle Fourche. Each evening the POWs were trucked to a barbed wire compound at Ft. Meade, their home from the fall of 1944 until late 1945.

    German soldiers on the African front were older men, for Hitler's Younger and stronger combatants fought in Europe. The Old World masonry and carpentry skills of these elder soldiers were used to accurately restore Ft. Meade's original buildings.

10/01/03