Fort Pierre: Fur Trade Capital of the Northwest
Near Pierre, South Dakota
The town of Fort Pierre sits on the west bank of the Missouri River across from the South Dakota capital, and its name traces to a French fur trader. In eighteen thirty-two, Pierre Chouteau Junior of the American Fur Company built a trading post here that became the largest and best-equipped on the northern Great Plains. For more than two decades, Fort Pierre was the fur-trade capital of the Northwest, processing and shipping hundreds of thousands of beaver pelts, deer skins, and buffalo hides to markets in the east and in Europe.
When the fur trade declined in the eighteen fifties, the United States Army briefly used the post as a military fort, and during the Black Hills Gold Rush of eighteen seventy-five the town served as a key supply outpost. The French explorers Louis-Joseph and Francois Verendrye had already passed through in seventeen forty-three, burying a lead plate on the nearby bluff to claim the land for France. Fort Pierre incorporated in eighteen ninety and today remains the sits directly across the river from the state capital.
