Fort Shaw

The panel's list of what marched from here leaves out January 1870. Major Eugene Baker's cavalry from Fort Ellis picked up two companies at this post and rode north on January 19, in killing cold, after Mountain Chief's band. On January 23 it struck the sleeping Pikuni camp of Heavy Runner on the Marias River instead, a chief who carried a paper promising the government's protection and was shot as he walked out to show it. Baker reported 173 killed; the dead were mostly women, children and old men, in a camp already sick with smallpox.

What the plaque says

Fort Shaw Barring fur trading posts, the first important white settlements in Montana were the mining camps in the western mountains. Everything to the east belonged to the plains Indians and was buffalo range. To protect the miners and settlers from possible incursions of hostile tribes, a series of military posts was established around the eastern border of the mining camps and settlements. Fort Shaw, established in 1867, was one of these. It also protected the stage and freight trail from Fort Benton, head of navigation on the Missouri, to the Last Chance Gulch placer diggings at Helena. Everything north of the Sun River was Blackfeet Indian Territory at that time. The fort was built by the 13th U.S. Infantry, under Major Wm. Clinton. General Gibbon led his troops from here in 1876 to join General Terry and General Custer on the Yellowstone just prior to the latter's disastrous fight with the Sioux and Cheyenne Indians at the Battle of the Little Big Horn.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Shaw Indian School — 0.5 mi
  An Army post turned boarding school, whose Native girls went to the 1904 World's Fair as an exhibit and came home champions.

More markers nearby

• Sun River Crossing — 5.5 mi
• The Sun River Leaving — 12 mi
• The Missouri River Canyon and Old US Highway 91 — 24 mi
• A Volcanic Island in the Rocky Mountains — 24 mi