Fort Benton was established in 1846, and by 1860 had developed into a hub for trade and travel since it was the last destination for steamboat travel on the Missouri River [no boats could navigate past the number of falls just beyond this place on the river]. From fur trading to gold seeking, this is where it all began.
But Fort Benton still has not lost its charm through the years, and I think we did almost fall in love with the friendly small-town lifestyle. It doesn’t seem at all like a modern town (no grocery store chains and no Starbucks). Too bad it gets so cold during the winter, but people seem to love it there (or they have their own RVs and go south for the winter.
When steamboats were on the Missouri in the 1800s, Fort Benton was the country’s innermost port. For 30 years steamboats regularly docked here, and the town bustled with the activity of merchants, traders, cowboys, American Indians, miners, and adventurers. The town’s restored Main Street honors is rich and rowdy history.
fur trade from early 1800s to 1862
In 1832, the American Fur Company steamboat Yellow Stone made a monumental journey upriver from St. Louis to the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers [remember Fort Union?]. As demand for beaver fur declined and buffalo robes became more popular, the company realized it needed steamboats to make the entire journey up the Missouri to transport the heavier and bulkier buffalo hides down to St. Louis. In 1860 the steamboats Chippewa and Key West reached the Fort Benton levee, the “World’s Innermost Post.” (More about this levee in this post.)
gold rush from 1862 to 1869
Gold was discovered in Montana in 1862. Word spread quickly, and passengers were soon paying $150-$200 [$5000-$6600 today] for a ride from St. Louis to Fort Benton, where they boarded wagons and stagecoaches bound for gold country. By the end of the Montana gold rush in 1836, steamboats and smaller craft had transported 200 tons of gold out of the state.
Fort Benton founded
The American Fur Company founded this waterfront city in 1846.
Logs were brought downstream in May 1847 from Fort Lewis and erected here. Its founder, Alexander Culbertson, named it Fort Benton on Christmas 1850 after completing his quarters, the fort’s first adobe building. From then until 1858, the logs were gradually replaced with adobe.
By 1865 the fur trade was dead, and the American Fur Company sold the fort, ending its control of the upper Missouri. By the time the military took over in 1869, it had fallen into disrepair and was rat-infested.
Gold strikes in Montana during the 1860s attracted hundreds of would-be miners from across the nation. They traveled by foot and wagon, but mostly by steamboat, with dreams of striking it rich. Many miners passed through Fort Benton on their way into the mountains and the town quickly became a bustling hub. While few prospectors found the fortunes they sought, merchants, bankers, freighters, and shopkeepers thrived by “mining the miners.”
The new structures were often outfitted with false fronts and siding so they appeared more substantial than they actually were. Stores, warehouses, hotels, saloons, dance halls, and brothels sprung up along the levee, and in 1864 Fort Benton officially became a town.
Grand Union Hotel then and now
steamboats
In the 25 years following the first gold discoveries in western Montana, and before railroads arrived in Fort Benton in 1887, steamboats made hundreds of trips bringing fortune-seekers and their supplies from St. Louis to Fort Benton. Some of the boats eventually sank or were destroyed in the turbulent, hazard-filled waters.
A frequent—and exhausting—challenge the boatmen faced was running around on the sandbars that were common in this river. At those time, long wooden poles (spars) were driven into the river-bottom to lift the boat. While noisy engines revved backwards, boatmen used ropes and pulleys to pry the wooden spars and wrestle the boat free. Called “grasshoppers” because their use made the boats resemble giant insects, the spars often had to be used repeatedly each time, lifting and moving the boat more feet or yards on its way, literally walking the boat down the river. [Reminds us of how the the expedition managed to get their keelboat up the Missouri River.]
The patio of the Interpretive Center in the next picture gives us a view of what this would have looked like. The patio is shaped to mirror that of a steamboat deck, with a wooden “grasshopper” on the left coming off the side. A capstan (rotating machine) on the deck, driven by a noisy engine that was in constant use at such times, moved ropes that raised the bow of the boat to free it form the sandbar.
The 10-mile section of the 1893 Missouri River Survey in the next picture shows the last obstacles before steamboats reached Fort Benton. I imagine this would have been around the White Cliffs section we talked about in the previous post.
Despite its romantic allure, steamboat travel was extremely hazardous. The Missouri River’s shoals, snags, and currents claimed more than 400 steamboats in less than 30 years. Most pilots traveled only in daylight so they could scan the river ahead in search of hazards.
Often piloted by Grant Marsh, it headed up the Yellowstone to the mouth of the Little Bighorn to load wounded soldiers from the Battle of Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876. The wounded were taken back to Bismark.
Even Father DeSmet [an important man of his age] found that navigating the Missouri River was one of the most dangerous things a man can undertake.
So who was Father DeSmet, and why was a town named after him? Wikipedia gave us this information:
“Pierre-Jean De Smet, (30 January 1801 – 23 May 1873), was a Flemish Catholic priest and member of the Jesuits. He is known primarily for his widespread missionary work in the mid-19th century among the Native American peoples, in the Midwestern and northwestern United States and western Canada.”
“In 1838 and 1839, De Smet helped to establish St. Joseph’s Mission in Pottawatomie territory, what is now Council Bluffs, Iowa, along the Upper Missouri River. These people had moved west from what is now Illinois.”
“De Smet used newly acquired mapping skills to produce the first detailed map of the upper Missouri River valley system, from below the Platte River to the Big Sioux River.”
freight out of Fort Benton
At the Fort Benton levee, 75% of freight for the northwest was unloaded here.
On June 14, 1869, nine sternwheelers [steamboats] moored along this bank, unloading whiskey, gold pans, salt, bacon, boots, and miners. Ox teams hauled the freight to faraway points. Wells Fargo coaches took miners to Helena for $25 [$614 today].
Six hundred mountain boats [this type of boat was needed since they were close to the Rocky Mountains] docked at Fort Benton from 1860 to 1890.
Per AI, “Mountain boats in 1860 were specially designed shallow steamboats built to navigate the upper Missouri River’s sandbars and low water, typically about 140–170 feet long and 30 feet wide with a spoon-bill bow. A single trip could carry roughly 200 tons of cargo upstream to places like Fort Benton, though the journey often took two to three months.”
Interesting how the styles of boats changed as captains learned what was needed over the years.
Steamboats supplied the Native Americans, traders, Canadian Mounties, U.S. Military, and gold camps. Benton merchants didn’t care who their customers were, and they bought their goods from whomever they could.
Before the railroad, most of Montana’s freight out of Fort Benton was carried by oxen and mules in big, lumbering Murphy wagons that could haul as much as 6 tons. Changing direction and speed was a matter of a bull-wacker and his whip, and as one muleskinner put it after extracting a chunk of hide at the crack of the whip was to “First to get the animal’s attention.”
So what’s a Murphy wagon? Here’s what I read on a National Park Service website that will also give you a picture of what a Murphy wagon looked like. Usually they were pulled by oxen.
“Joseph Murphy began producing wagons for the traders headed west from Missouri to Santa Fe and later for the overland emigration. His wagons became the best known on the western trails. Murphy’s wagons consisted of wheels, running gear, a box and a cover. They were usually nine feet high with a twelve foot long bed. The bed of a Murphy wagon had a straight box, unlike its more famous counterpart, the Conestoga, which had a curved box. A Murphy could comfortably haul between 1,800 to 2,200 pounds. Straying too far from these specifications risked serious problems.”
AI noted, “Murphy wagons were heavy-duty freight wagons built in St. Louis and widely used by pioneers and the U.S. government during the mid-1800s, including on the Santa Fe, California, and Oregon Trails. Joseph Murphy’s shop, established in 1825, produced over 200,000 wagons by the late 1800s, with many used by the military during the Mexican War.”
Alexander Toponce was one of the early independent freighters out of Fort Benton. He had a string of wagons and oxen, and hauled freight across the Montana Territory. The Benton to Helena Wagon Road was the busiest route in Montana during the gold rush days.
Here’s an interesting story.
On the way, Toponce realized that all of the sacks weighed 120 pounds or more, so he took out the extra of 9500 pounds and loaded them into the rear wagons before continuing to Helena.
The merchant thought that that extra sugar belonged to him, but Topance showed him the bill of lading for 50,000 pounds of sugar that were just delivered.
Here’s what AI had to say about the importance of sugar at the time: “Bags of sugar were important in the late 1800s out of Fort Benton because the fort served as a key economic center and port for transporting goods, including sugar, to the growing populations in the West. The demand for sugar increased as it became a staple in diets and was used in various products, making it a valuable commodity during that time.” We had a sweet tooth even back then.
nasty guys at Fort Benton
The close association of the most celebrated group of outlaws of the 1870s began during the Civil War. Commands of southern guerrillas who raided throughout Missouri and Kansas were led by William Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson. Other members were Jesse and Frank James, the Youngers, Sam Bass, and James Berry, all who had Fort Benton and Montana connections.
The first incident with Quantrill’s ruffians occurred in 1866 shortly after the Civil War when one of his raiders turned traitor to their cause and headed west to escape their revenge. Wanting to get their traitor, the gang commandeered the steamer Richmond and came upriver to find him. At the mouth of the Judith River [just north of where we are], they sent a couple of men ahead to locate the traitor and get ready for a hanging. When the scouts arrived in Helena [today just 95 miles away], they discovered that the traitor had been killed a couple of weeks earlier.
Fort Benton and its vicinity became a refuge from the law for many. Jesse and Frank James came in the winter of 1873-74 and knew the wilds of Montana as a great place to avoid the lawmen in Missouri.
This Wild Bunch operated in this area too.
great interpretive center
our lifestyle
We spent almost a week at Fort Benton so I could work on our blog posts and relax.
Are you ready to start seeing the Great Falls that the Corps of Discovery were looking for ever since they left Fort Mandan in North Dakota? Keep reading.
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