Cree Crossing

One Fort Peck gravel pit near the crossing was at Cole, a whistle-stop on the Great Northern's Turner branch about ten miles northwest of Saco. In 1934 two Saco men, Charles McChesney and Stan Hetrick, told the Army Corps of Engineers there was gravel there; tests found millions of cubic yards, and the J. L. Shiely Company of St. Paul built a screening and washing plant. Cole grew almost overnight past a thousand people living in boxcars, tents, bunkhouses and shacks, with a store, a nightclub and a theatre. Piles of gravel are what is left of it.

What the plaque says

Cree Crossing The Missouri River once flowed through this valley as it made its way northeasterly to Hudson's Bay. A gigantic ice dam diverted the Missouri to its current channel about 15,000 years ago. The Milk River occupies the old channel and flows through a valley choked with glacial debris. The river is as crooked as a dog's hind leg and at certain times of the year it may appear to be somewhat trivial and even dusty. But during the spring thaws it gets right down to business and runs bank full. One of the best fords across the river in this part of Montana lies just northeast of here. For thousands of years, the crossing was used by the Indians to reach the buffalo range to the south. Although other tribes used the ford, it became known as Cree Crossing. Archaeological evidence indicates that people have been using it for at least 5,000 years. They left evidence of their presence in abandoned campsites and petroglyphs carved into the boulders haphazardly strewn about the area. During the 1930s, rock and gravel fill material needed for the massive Fort Peck Dam was quarried from a location just north of Cree Crossing.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sleeping Buffalo Rock — 5.3 mi
  A sacred boulder marked as a resting buffalo, taken off its ridge above the Milk River in the 1930s and sheltered now beside U.S. 2.
• Great Plains Dinosaur Museum — 20 mi
  Home of Leonardo, the duckbill that kept its skin for seventy-seven million years, found in the breaks north of Malta in 2000.

More markers nearby

• Sleeping Buffalo Rock — 5.3 mi
• The Long, Long Trail — 5.3 mi
• Cattle Brands — 19 mi