| Summary: | The Willisten Story Fort Union By Laura Trowbridge In the early years of the nineteenth century, the rolling prairies of western North Dakota were inhabited only by bands of wandering Indians and herds of buffalo. Xo white men had seen the country since Lewis and Clark, the Government explorers, had traveled up the Missouri River on their way to the Pacific Ocean. In the eastern and northern area of which was liter Dakota Territory, fur trading posts had been established where the Hudson Hay and British Fur Companies carried on a lucrative fur trading business with the friendly Indians. One of the later, enterprising Fur Companies to be stablished at that time, was the American Fur Company, which chose to move its operations farther westward into a new part of the frontier where competition would not be so great. In 1828 Kenneth McKenzic, a member of the American Fur Company, built Fort Union, the principal post of the company on the upper Missouri, three miles from the mouth of the Yellowstone. Because his company had joined the Columbia Fur Company a little earlier, the name of Union was chosen for the new fur trading post. It was the best-known as well as the most strongly-built post in the West. A palisaded fort with stone bastions, with commodious rooms, and barracks. Because it was in the interest of the Fur Trading Companies to obtain furs at the lowest cost possible, the factors at the posts sometimes used scurrilous methods in their dealings with the Indians to secure the furs. Kenneth McKenzie went down in history as one of the worst offenders in the practice, so far as the Federal Government was concerned. Hie unscrupulous factor at Fort Union used whiskey, which he smuggled into the Fort 1))' means of boats which plied up and down the Missouri, bringing supplies and hauling bundles of furs to market. When the government put pressure on him to stop the illicit practice he traded with the Indians for corn which he converted into whiskey at the post, using a still he had constructed there. Mr. McKenzic was the factor at Fort Union for nearly forty years, when General Sully visited the post on one of his Indian campaigns in 1864, and reported to the government that unless the liquor traffic were stopped at the post the Indian troubles never would cease in this part of the country. Upon his recommendation, the fort was dismantled in 1866 and the material in the buildings moved down the river to the mouth of the Yellowstone River and Fort Buford established as a military post on the site of old Fort William, a small rival fur trading post that had sold out to the American Fur Company in the early eighteen hundreds. The factor of that post had been a Frenchman by the name of Charles Larpentier, who also used whiskey in trading will) the Indians. Fort Buford became very important in the settlement of the Indian troubles and played an important part in establishing the Indians on reservations. Father DeSmet, foremost of Fort Union's noted visitors, was a missionary priest in the western Indian tribes and was affectionately known to them as "Black Robe". He traveled unaccompanied from one fort to another unmolested by the Indians, and repeatedly we find Father DeSmet the official mediator between the government and the outraged Indian people. The first river steamer to reach Fort Union arrived there in 1832. under the guidance of Captain La- Barge, most famous of river boat captains who had more than fifty years experince on the Missouri. George Catlin, noted painter of Indian life, stayed several days at the fort in the same year, but whether he came on the first steamer, or not, is not known. But as the boats at that time could make only one trip a year from St. Louis as far as Fort Union, it is thought that lie did. The next year, 1833, Maxmillian, Prince of Weid, Germany, who was a noted scientist, and Bodner, the Swiss artist, arrived at Fort Union for a visit while they carried on their professions, studying recording with pen and brush the life on the frontier. They came on the second steamer, the Assiniboine. Ten years later, 1843, John James Audubon, the great naturalist, spent the entire summer at Fort Union, painting specimens of the larger animal of the prairies for use in his book "North American Quadrupeds". Isaac Stevens WAR DANCE--The Indians In full regalia at Fort Union celo- r^Mrj bratlon, July 18, 1925. FORT UNION, 1864. Picture from Forty Years a Fur Trader.' Overall view of encampment. Scanned with a Zeutschel Zeta book scanner at 300 dpi. Edited in Multi-page TIFF Editor.
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