Steam on the Missouri: Boats, Trains, and a Town Overnight

The Missouri River had always been a highway, but in the eighteen thirties it became a highway with engines. The steamboat Yellow Stone reached the Fort Pierre area in eighteen thirty-one and continued upriver to Fort Union the following year, and within a decade paddlewheelers were churning up to Fort Pierre Chouteau every spring, loaded with trade goods and heading back east with bales of buffalo robes. The steamboat era transformed the fort from a remote frontier outpost into a node in a continental supply chain.

But the steamboat's reign over the upper Missouri was shorter than anyone expected. Railroads killed it. In eighteen eighty, the Chicago and North Western Railway drove its tracks west across Dakota Territory and stopped at the east bank of the Missouri, directly across from the old Fort Pierre site. The railroad company platted a new townsite there and named it Pierre, after the long-defunct trading post across the river. The town that existed before the railroad had been just a ferry landing and a cluster of traders' shacks. By the end of eighteen eighty, Pierre had a proper street grid, land offices, a newspaper, and several thousand new residents.

The speed of that transformation was staggering even by frontier standards. Land that had been open tribal country a few years earlier, guaranteed to the Sioux by the Fort Laramie Treaty of eighteen sixty-eight, was now a platted town accepting homestead filings. The government had simply declared the treaty void, opened the land for settlement, and let the railroad do the rest. Pierre was a railroad town from its first breath, built not because the location had particular merit but because the tracks stopped there and the ferry ran across.