Fort Union Trading Post

A few miles west of where you are, at the confluence of the Yellowstone and the Missouri, stands the reconstructed palisade of Fort Union Trading Post. For nearly forty years, from eighteen twenty-eight to eighteen sixty-seven, this was the most important commercial hub on the upper Missouri River. The American Fur Company built it here deliberately: the Yellowstone poured into the Missouri just upstream, making Fort Union the crossroads of two great river highways.

At its peak, Fort Union was a small city unto itself. The bourgeois house at the center, built of whitewashed brick, would not have looked out of place in Saint Louis. Around it rose trade rooms, storehouses, and quarters for employees who came from Canada, Scotland, the Orkney Islands, and across the Indigenous nations of the Northern Plains. The Assiniboine, the Crow, the Blackfoot Confederacy, the Cree, and the Mandan all brought their winter's hunt here: beaver pelts in the early decades, then bison robes as silk hats replaced felt in European fashion.

The artist George Catlin arrived in eighteen thirty-two on the first steamboat ever to reach Fort Union, painting the people he encountered with a sense of urgency he later admitted bordered on grief. Karl Bodmer followed the next year, and his watercolors remain among the most precise visual records of Plains nations before the catastrophic smallpox epidemic of eighteen thirty-seven, which killed an estimated ninety percent of the Mandan people, along with heavy losses among the Hidatsa and Arikara, along this river.

By the eighteen sixties, the buffalo trade was collapsing and the United States Army wanted the land. The government bought Fort Union in eighteen sixty-seven, dismantled it for timber to build nearby Fort Buford, and the great trading post disappeared into the bluffs. The National Park Service reconstructed the bourgeois house and bastions in the nineteen eighties and nineties, using original survey records. What you see today is as close as archaeology could get to what Catlin and Bodmer once painted.