The Last Boat to Fort Benton
By Editor
Fort Benton, Montana, 1859-1890
There was a point on the sandstone bluff north of Fort Benton, called Signal Point, from which a man with good eyes could see eight miles down the Missouri River. When a steamboat rounded the bend at that distance, the spotter would send word to town, and the levee would come alive with the particular commerce of a place that understood itself to be the door through which everything necessary to the territory must pass. Fort Benton was, in those years, the head of navigation on the Missouri River, which was to say it was the head of navigation on the longest river in North America, which was to say it was the commercial capital of a territory that had no other practical connection to the world.
The first steamboat to dock at Fort Benton arrived on July 2, 1860. It was the Chippewa, out of St. Louis, and it had taken sixty days to make the journey, which was the standard passage. The fare was $150, which was a considerable sum, but the men who paid it were going to the gold camps of southwestern Montana, and they expected to recover their investment with interest. Between 1860 and 1888, an estimated 600 steamboats arrived at the Fort Benton levee. In the peak years, an average of twenty boats a year made the passage. The one-and-a-half-mile levee was piled, from the time the ice melted in spring until the river froze in fall, with goods headed for the mining camps and the settlements that had grown up around them.
The Missouri River Steamboat Era lasted from 1859 until 1888, which is twenty-nine years. It was not a long era, as historical eras go, but it was a complete one, with a beginning and a middle and an end, and the end came not from any failure of the river or the boats but from the arrival of a technology that was faster, cheaper, and indifferent to the seasons. The Northern Pacific Railroad reached Fort Benton in 1887. The last commercial steamboat arrived in 1890. The interval between those two events is the measure of how quickly a river trade that had taken thirty years to build could be made obsolete.
The Northern Pacific's arrival was not unexpected. The railroad had been advancing across Montana Territory for years, and the men who ran the steamboat companies understood what it meant. In 1883, the Northern Pacific made a special contract with the two foremost remaining steamboat companies, the Fort Benton Transportation Company and the Coulson Line, that essentially sealed their fate. The contract gave the railroad preferential rates on freight that had previously moved by river, and the steamboat companies, having agreed to terms that guaranteed their own diminishment, spent the next few years watching their traffic transfer to the rails.
Fort Benton had been, as Winfield Stocking wrote, the Chicago of the plains. It had been the anchor of the Mullan Road, the 625-mile road to Walla Walla, Washington. It had been the place where all trails began and where all goods arrived. When the railroad came, it became a town on a branch line, which is a different thing entirely. The levee where the steamboats had unloaded their cargoes of miners and merchants and goods from St. Louis fell quiet. The spotter at Signal Point had nothing to watch for.
The last steamboat to reach Fort Benton is not celebrated in the way that first boats are celebrated. There was no ceremony, no golden spike, no gathering of dignitaries. The river simply stopped being used, and the boats that had used it found other work or were broken up for timber, and the Missouri ran on as it had always run, carrying nothing but water and the memory of commerce down to the Gulf of Mexico.
The Signal Point bluff is still there. The Missouri still bends below it. On a clear day you can see eight miles downstream, to where the river curves out of sight around the cottonwoods, and there is nothing coming.
See also
- Fort Benton, Montana, history and steamboat era
- Missouri River, navigation history
- Northern Pacific Railway, arrival in Montana and displacement of river trade