Fort Assinniboine

The Army built Fort Assinniboine in 1879, three years after the Little Bighorn, as a brick post meant to last, southwest of where Havre now stands. Its job was the Canadian line: to patrol it, and to intimidate and contain the Blackfeet, Cree, Métis and Lakota who crossed it. In thirty-two years its soldiers fought no great battle. From 1892 to 1900 the garrison included companies of the Army's Black regiments, the 24th and 25th Infantry and the 10th Cavalry, the men known as Buffalo Soldiers.

The work they are best remembered for here is a deportation. Several hundred Cree had come south after the North-West Resistance of 1885, Little Bear's band among them, and Montanans called them Canadian Indians with no right to stay, though Cree people had lived on both sides of the line long before anyone drew it. In 1896 Congress put up $5,000 to send them north. A 10th Cavalry company under Lieutenant John J. Pershing, who would command the American armies in France twenty years later, rounded up Cree camps as far south as Great Falls and escorted the prisoners to the border. The government had promised them amnesty; the Mounted Police arrested Little Bear and Lucky Man as soon as they crossed. By the turn of the century most of the deported Cree had come back.

The Army left in 1911. The state took the post for an agricultural experiment station in 1915, now Montana State University's Northern Agricultural Research Center, and in 1916 Congress set aside much of the old military reservation as Rocky Boy's, a home at last for the Chippewa band of Stone Child, whom the government called Rocky Boy, and for Little Bear's Cree. Most of the post is gone; a handful of its buildings stand among the research plots, and the Fort Assinniboine Preservation Association gives tours from a visitor center on the grounds.