Fort Benton

The panel names Culbertson; the post was as much his wife's. Natawista, daughter of the Kainai leader Two Suns, married him at Fort Union in 1840, a match that bound the American Fur Company to her people's trade. The post began upstream as Fort Lewis and took Senator Benton's name in 1850. In 1853 she insisted on riding with Isaac Stevens's railroad survey to Fort Benton, telling her husband she might explain her people and the whites to each other. After his fortune was gone she went home, and she died on the Blood Reserve in Alberta in 1893.

What the plaque says

Fort Benton Alexander Culbertson established Fort Benton in 1846 as an American Fur Company trading post. The remote settlement prospered in the 1850s, but it wasn't until the following decade that it really boomed. The arrival of the steamboat Chippewa at the post in 1859 ushered in a new era of trade at the World's Innermost Port. The boat carried buffalo robes and other furs downriver to St. Louis; three years later, the cargo was much more valuable, gold from the rip-roaring mining camps in southwestern Montana. At its height in 1867, 39 steamboats tied up at the levy depositing supplies and passengers destined for the gold fields. Saloons, hurdy-gurdy houses, and other businesses served a cosmopolitan and transient population. The streets crowded with people from all over North America, Europe, and Asia. It was truly a wide open town. By 1870, the boom had gone bust, but Fort Benton enjoyed a brief revival when the town's merchants began freighting supplies to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police forts north of the border over the famed Whoop Up Trail. Today, Fort Benton is a National Historic Landmark because of its rich and colorful history on the upper Missouri River.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Shep, Fort Benton — 1.8 mi
  A sheepdog who met every train at Fort Benton for five and a half years, waiting for a master who had gone home in a coffin.
• Decision Point — 10 mi
  The rise where Lewis and Clark spent ten days in 1805 deciding which river was the Missouri, against nearly every man in the party.

More markers nearby

• Fort Benton and the Mullan Road — steps away
• The Manitoba Railroad — 10 mi
• Marias River — 10 mi
• A Montana Crossroads — 13 mi