Fur Posts

The bronze counts Joseph Renville among the British subjects who formed the Columbia Fur Company in 1821. He was born about 1779 at Kaposia, near present St. Paul, the son of a French trader and a Mdewakanton Dakota woman, and in the War of 1812, when the bronze says he knew Tecumseh, he led Dakota fighters as a captain in British service. After the trade he settled at Lac qui Parle in Minnesota, where his translations of scripture were among the first attempts to set the Dakota language down in writing.

What the plaque says

Fur Posts 1817 - 1868 For half a century, the area near the Mouth of Bad River was one of America's Fur Capitals. There were ten fur posts here over the years. In 1805 Lewis & Clark's reports of the richness of the fur trade on the Missouri was causing a turmoil and in 1808 John Jacob Astor formed the American Fur Company which was to become America's biggest business. In 1821 Joseph Renville, William Laidlaw, Kenneth McKenzie, all British subjects, with Daniel Lamont, an American partner, formed Tilton & Company usually known as the Columbia Fur Co. and the next year built Fort Tecumseh, named for the famous Shawnee chief, whom Renville knew, on the west bank of the Missouri, then an open channel, about a mile above Bad River, within a few rods of this marker. It was sold by Columbia to the Upper Missouri Outfit, a subsidiary of the American Fur Company in 1827 and because of the encroachment of the river was moved 1 3/4 miles N and renamed Ft. Pierre Choteau in 1832. In 1831 the "Yellowstone," first steamboat on the Missouri, came up as far as Ft. Tecumseh. In 1833 Sublette & Campbell had a trade post in "opposition" a little south of this site. When Pierre was the world's largest shipping point for cattle, this area was the holding grounds and a few rods upstream was the rail- road company's pile bridge to Marions Island from where the ferries took them over river. Erected 1956 by Fischer Brothers and State Highway Commission

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Verendrye Monument — 0.4 mi
  The hilltop above Fort Pierre where three children found a lead plate in 1913 that two French brothers had buried in 1743 to claim the West for their king.
• South Dakota State Capitol — 1.6 mi
  A copper-domed capitol built to end three elections' worth of fighting over where the capital belonged, beside a lake fed by an artesian well with a gas flame burning in it.
• Oahe Dam — 6.6 mi
  One of the largest rolled-earth dams in the world, dedicated by President Kennedy in 1962, holding back a reservoir that reaches more than 230 miles to Bismarck.

More markers nearby

• Fort Pierre — steps away
• Father Hoecken Monument — steps away
• Verendrye Hill and Monument — steps away
• The Stockgrowers Bank of Fort Pierre — 0.2 mi