Fort Union and the Fur Trade: Where the Missouri Met the World

In eighteen twenty-eight or twenty-nine, Kenneth McKenzie of the American Fur Company chose the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers as the site for a new trading post. Fort Union would become the most important trading post in the northern plains, operating for nearly forty years and handling more beaver pelts, bison robes, and trade goods than any other post in the region.

The fur trade that Fort Union served was a global industry. The beaver pelts coming down the Missouri were destined for European hat markets. The bison robes were going to urban consumers in eastern American cities. The men doing the trapping and the trading came from everywhere: French-Canadian voyageurs, American and British company men, Assiniboine and Crow and Blackfeet hunters who were the essential labor force the whole enterprise depended on.

Fort Union drew the great artists and naturalists of the era. George Catlin arrived in eighteen thirty-two on the first steamboat to reach the post, spending weeks painting Assiniboine, Crow, and Blackfeet subjects. John James Audubon made his Missouri River expedition to Fort Union in eighteen forty-three, the last great journey of his collecting life. Karl Bodmer, the Swiss artist, painted some of the most precise visual records of Plains Indian life ever made during his stay in eighteen thirty-three and thirty-four.

What those artists captured was a world already changing. The beaver trade had peaked and would collapse within a decade. The bison trade that replaced it would drive the herds to near-extinction by the eighteen seventies. The artists who came to Fort Union were documenting, in some cases without knowing it, a way of life at the moment of its disruption.

Fort Union has been reconstructed and is now a National Historic Site near Williston, North Dakota, just across the Montana border, where the two rivers still meet.