Fort Benton: Birthplace of Montana

Stand on the levee at Fort Benton and you are standing at the end of the world's longest navigable waterway. From this bend in the Missouri River, a steamboat could travel more than two thousand three hundred miles to St. Louis without portaging once. That geographic fact made this small Montana town one of the most consequential places in the entire American West.

The American Fur Company established the post in eighteen forty-six, floating the first structure downriver on a raft the following spring to land here on the Missouri's south bank. They called it Fort Lewis at first, then renamed it Fort Benton in eighteen fifty in honor of Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, the great champion of westward expansion. For the next four decades, almost everything and everyone entering the northern Rockies passed through here.

The real transformation came after gold. When prospectors struck at Grasshopper Creek in eighteen sixty-two, and then at Alder Gulch the following year, Fort Benton erupted into one of the most improbable boomtowns on earth. Steamboats loaded with miners, merchants, whiskey, and machine parts pushed upriver from St. Louis, taking weeks to fight the current. In eighteen sixty-seven alone, the wealth extracted from Montana's mountains was staggering: twenty-four million dollars in gold left the territory that year, and five-sixths of it departed by river through Fort Benton. Soldiers arrived here. Missionaries arrived here. The North West Mounted Police crossed from here into Canada in eighteen seventy-four to bring order to the whiskey trade. The Whoop-Up Trail north to Alberta and the Mullan Road west to Walla Walla both anchored at this levee.

The steamboat era ended abruptly when the Great Northern Railway reached Great Falls in eighteen eighty-seven. Within a season, a freight route that had carried the commerce of an empire became a quiet backwater. Fort Benton shrank. But the town that remains is a kind of open-air museum of the frontier: the ruins of the original trading post adobe walls, the levee where the boats tied up, and the keelboat replica moored at river's edge. The surrounding Chouteau County still raises some of the best winter wheat in Montana, but it is the river, slow and brown beneath the bluffs, that tells you everything about why this place existed.