Fort Fizzle

In the summer of 1877 the Army had only just come to Missoula. Two companies of the 7th Infantry under Captain Charles Rawn arrived in late June to build a post, and within weeks word came that the non-treaty Nimiipuu, the bands that had refused to move onto the shrunken reservation, were coming over the Lolo Trail after the fighting in Idaho. On July 25 Rawn took about thirty-five soldiers up Lolo Creek, chose a narrow place in the canyon, and threw up a breastwork of logs and earth. Volunteers from Missoula and the Bitterroot came out to stand with him, a couple of hundred at the most.

The Nimiipuu leaders met Rawn up the creek and told him they meant to pass in peace. He told them they could not pass without giving up their guns, ammunition and horses. Many of the volunteers, satisfied with the promise, went home. On the morning of July 28 the whole camp, families and herds together, climbed out of the canyon onto the ridge to the north, went around the barricade, and came down into the Bitterroot. The town papers named the place Fort Fizzle and blamed Rawn; Colonel John Gibbon later cleared him, saying he had never been given enough men.

Fire took the last of the logs in 1934. The Forest Service keeps the site as a picnic area beside US-12 about five miles west of Lolo, with a reconstructed stretch of the breastwork and interpretive panels along the creek.