Fort Wingate

Apache Scouts visiting Fort Wingate during the 1880s. Fort Wingate is near Gallup, New Mexico. There were two other locations in New Mexico which were called Fort Wingate: Seboyeta, New Mexico (1849-1862) and San Rafael, New Mexico (1862-1868). The most recent Fort Wingate (1868-1993) was established at the former site of Fort Lyon, on Navajo territory, initially to control and "protect" the large Navajo tribe to its north. The Fort at San Rafael was the staging point for the Navajo deportation known as the Navajo's Long Walk. From 1870 onward the garrison near Gallup was concerned with Apaches to the south, and through 1890 hundreds of Navajo Scouts were enlisted at the fort. Fort Wingate supplied 100 tons of Composition B high explosives to the Manhattan Project for use in the first Trinity test and became an ammunition depot "Fort Wingate Depot Activity" from World War II until BRAC closed it in 1993. Environmental cleanup of UXO, perchlorate and lead as well as land transfer continue to the present day.