The Carroll Trail

The board abandons the trail in 1876, but the landing lasted six years longer. The plan rested on the Northern Pacific, which had reached Bismarck: goods from St. Paul rode the rails west, then a steamboat up the Missouri, then Diamond R wagons from Carroll to Helena. The first teams left Helena for the landing on March 16, 1874, and men of the 7th Infantry garrisoned it in the summers of 1874 and 1875. Supplies for Fort Maginnis came up the same way in 1880 and 1881, and the town and landing were not abandoned until 1882.

What the plaque says

The Carroll Trail Businessmen in Montana Territory were always looking for ways to undercut their competitors. In 1874, the owners of the famed Diamond R Freighting Company tried to steal the lucrative steamboat trade from Fort Benton merchants by building a new port on the Missouri River near the mouth of the Musselshell. Named for Matt Carroll, the settlement was a crude collection of log huts perched on a cut bank overlooking the river. For the new settlement to be successful it needed a good road to connect it to the outside world. In 1873, the Diamond R blazed a 225-mile road to Carroll from Helena and the first freight train negotiated the trail to Carroll the following year. While one account claimed that the road had "plentiful supplies of wood and water," other travelers described a forbidding landscape of "little vegetation" that was "incapable of affording sustenance to man or beasts." When the road was dry, it took freight trains about a month to make the trip between Carroll and Helena. But when the road was wet it became a "greasy, slippery, fathomless mass of clinging mud, through which the straining animals [could] hardly drag the heavily-weighted wheels." Carroll failed to make money for the Diamond R and the company abandoned the post and the trail in 1876.

Where it stands

More markers nearby

• The Smith River Valley — 21 mi