Fort Pierre Chouteau: Hub of the Plains Fur Trade

In eighteen thirty-two, Pierre Chouteau Junior built a trading post on the west bank of the Missouri, replacing a smaller and shoddier structure called Fort Tecumseh that had stood a short distance upstream. He named the new fort for himself. Fort Pierre Chouteau became the most important commercial hub on the northern plains and, for two decades, the engine of a global industry in animal hides.

Chouteau ran the Western Department of John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company, and Fort Pierre sat at the geographic center of his operation, halfway between the company's Saint Louis headquarters and its northernmost posts in what is now Montana. From this single post, trappers and Lakota hunters brought in beaver pelts, deer skins, and especially buffalo robes by the tens of thousands. The robes went east by keelboat and later by steamboat, traded onward to Europe where American bison hide was fashionable for lap robes and overcoats. The Upper Missouri region produced more furs between eighteen thirty and eighteen sixty-five than any other territory in North America.

In eighteen thirty-two and eighteen thirty-three, the fort attracted two of the most important artist-observers of the American West. George Catlin visited in eighteen thirty-two, painting the fort and the Lakota camps around it. Karl Bodmer arrived the following year with Prince Maximilian of Wied, producing meticulous watercolors that remain the most detailed portraits of Plains Indian life ever made before the reservation era.

In eighteen fifty-four, the fur trade had faded enough that Chouteau sold the post to the United States Army for forty-five thousand dollars. The army renamed it Fort Pierre, used it briefly, then abandoned it in eighteen fifty-seven as too costly to maintain. The walls rotted. The site is now a National Historic Landmark just across the bridge.