Three Forks: Where the Missouri Begins and the Fur Trade Bled

You are near the exact spot where the Missouri River is born, and where the American fur trade met some of its most violent ends.

In late July of eighteen oh five, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark arrived here after months of pushing up the Missouri from the east, and they recognized immediately that they had reached the river's source. Three streams of nearly equal size converged on the valley floor. The captains named them for the three most powerful men in Washington: the Jefferson for the president, the Madison for the secretary of state, and the Gallatin for the secretary of the treasury. Sacagawea, traveling with the Corps of Discovery, recognized the confluence. She had been kidnapped by Hidatsa raiders near this very spot five years earlier, seized while her Shoshone band was camped at the headwaters. Her recognition helped Clark confirm their location and gave the expedition confidence that horses and a mountain crossing could be found to the west.

The Corps moved on. A few years later, members of that same expedition returned as private fur trappers working for Manuel Lisa's Missouri Fur Company, and the Three Forks proved murderous. John Potts, who had crossed the continent with the Corps of Discovery, was caught trapping by Blackfeet warriors in eighteen oh eight. When he shot and killed one of the warriors rather than surrender, he was riddled with bullets. His companion John Colter escaped by sprinting naked across the prairie in one of the most famous survival stories of the West. Two years later, in eighteen ten, the expedition's most skilled hunter and tracker, George Drouillard, failed to return from a trapping run in the same territory. A search party found his remains: he had been beheaded, and his body mutilated in what warriors understood as a ritual statement of war. The Three Forks was trapped out by eighteen twenty-two, its beaver gone and its keepers dead or driven off.

The town that sits here today was founded in nineteen oh eight when the railroad arrived. The Missouri Headwaters State Park, just outside town, preserves the confluence where Lewis and Clark stood and where the deadliest chapter of the American fur trade played out on the same windswept plain.