Montrose — Fort, Roses, and the First Missouri Dragoons

The town of Montrose sits at one of the most charged spots on the upper Mississippi, directly across the river from Nauvoo, Illinois, where the Mormon city was rising in the eighteen forties, and on a bluff where the United States Army had already come and gone before most settlers arrived.

In eighteen thirty-four the government established the first Fort Des Moines on this bluff, named for its position at the head of the river's lower rapids. Three companies of the First United States Dragoons, an elite cavalry force only recently created, were stationed here in the aftermath of the Black Hawk War, tasked with holding the frontier and reassuring the newly displaced indigenous communities that order would follow the conquest. The Dragoons occupied the fort until the spring of eighteen thirty-seven, when they were reassigned to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas.

An Iowa land speculator named David Kilbourne platted a village on the site in eighteen thirty-six, naming it Mount of Roses after the wild roses blooming on the bluffs. The name compressed over time to Montrose.

Then came the Latter-day Saints. After Joseph Smith negotiated land purchases across the river in Illinois and in Iowa in eighteen thirty-nine, Brigham Young and other Mormon leaders moved into the abandoned fort buildings on the Montrose bluff, using them as temporary housing while the new city of Nauvoo was built on the Illinois side. The combination, a view of a rising religious city, wild roses on the hillside, a river crossing thick with traffic, made Montrose one of the stranger confluences of American frontier history: military, mercantile, and millennial all at once.

The Mormons eventually left for Nauvoo and then for Utah, and Montrose settled into the quiet persistence of a Mississippi river town. But for a few years in the late eighteen thirties, this bluff concentrated more of the turbulent energies of American expansion, military ambition, and religious utopianism in one small place than almost anywhere else on the frontier.