Frenchtown: Where the Trappers Put Down Roots

The community you are passing through carries one of the most straightforward names in Montana. The French Canadians who settled here in the late eighteen fifties simply called it their town, and that stuck.

Baptiste Ducharme and Louis Brun arrived in this valley of the Clark Fork around eighteen fifty-eight. Both were French Canadians who had spent years in the mountain trade, and both brought Métis and Salish families. When the American fur trade collapsed and political upheaval followed the arrival of federal authorities in the Pacific Northwest, these families moved inland, away from the disruption, and chose a stretch of valley along the Clark Fork. They began farming, cattle, grain, vegetables, on land the Salish had long used as a corridor between the mountains and the buffalo plains to the east.

Their timing coincided with a major construction project. Between eighteen fifty-nine and eighteen sixty, the U.S. Army was building the Mullan Road, a military wagon route connecting Fort Benton on the Missouri River to Walla Walla in Washington Territory. The road passed directly through this valley, bringing soldiers, surveyors, and eventually more settlers rolling through a community that had barely existed a year before.

A log church went up in the eighteen sixties, served by Jesuit missionaries who ministered to both the French Canadian families and the neighboring Salish. Later, that log structure was replaced by Saint John the Baptist Church with a gleaming white steeple, still a landmark on the valley floor today.

Frenchtown never became a city. It remained what it started as: a farming community at the junction of two cultures, where the children of mountain men and the grandchildren of Salish families built something quieter and longer-lasting than the mining camps that consumed so much of Montana's early history.