The Missouri River, at 2,540 miles in length, is one of the Nation’s most historic arteries.  It was the primary route of Lewis and Clark on their epic journey to the Pacific Ocean and back.

Long before Lewis and Clark made their epic journey, the Missouri River shared with the Oregon Trail and the Santa Fe Trail the distinction of being one of the three main thoroughfares to the Far West.  It witnessed a parade of countless fur traders, explorers, adventurers, missionaries, and those looking for a new home in the west.  But here on the river, instead of the covered wagons, conveyance was at the beginning by canoe, pirogue, keelboat, and later the steamboat.

The pirogue was the vessel used most often by the fur traders in getting their supplies to the fur post or fort and later transporting their furs to St. Louis.  They were the workhorse boats of the western rivers.

The pirogue was a 35 to 45 foot craft shaped like a flat-iron (used by your grandmother to iron clothes), made of fabricated planks, flat-bottomed, powered by six to eight oars, and a square sail.  Horses were sometimes used to pull the boats upstream.  The two pirogues used by Lewis and Clark could each carry 8 tons.

The earliest fur traders, those that engaged in the traffic of trading with the Natives, were men of no ordinary mold.  They were indeed unique.  They did not fit the traditional image nor did they represent those who had the desire to explore and settle new territory.

From a practical point of view, the small stream was the main source of their furs.  To the individual trapper, these streams were the familiar location of their lonely labor.  It was his duty to seek them out and explore them for beaver.  In carrying out his duty it may be doubted if there was a rivulet in all the mountains of the west, capable of sustaining a beaver family, which he had not visited.

These trappers were acquainted with all the sources of all the rivers west of the Mississippi, and many a stream which is unknown and unvisited today was a familiar haunt to them.  Indeed, they were truly our first explorers.

Ray Billington, in his classic WESTWARD EXPANSION: A History of the American Frontier, wrote:

“Fur traders succeeded where official explorers failed.  Unsung and unheralded, too busy — or too uneducated — to seek fame by recording their wanderings, driven onward by the quest for prosaic (ordinary) profits rather than scientific curiosity, adventurous frontiersmen penetrated into every nook and corner of the Far West between 1807 and 1840.  Spurring them on was the realization that peltry was cheapest among unsophisticated Indians who would barter bales of furs for a handful of trinkets.”

He went on to say:  “That common sense point of view gave the trading frontier its remarkable mobility; the constant object of every trapper was to break through the fringe of sophisticated tribes to the richer regions beyond.  Those unofficial explorers spied out the secrets of all the West, plotted the course of its rivers, discovered the passes through its mountains, and prepared the way for settlers by breaking down Indian self-sufficiency.  No single group contributed more to the conquest of the trans-Mississippi region than those little-known adventurers.”

Early in the 1790s, merchants in St. Louis founded an organization known as the “Company of Discoveries of the Upper Missouri.”  It was also known as “The Commercial Company for the Discovery of the Nations of the Upper Missouri.”  Although it had as many as ten different names, it was later just simply called the “Missouri Company.”

These individuals were intent on exploiting the fur resources of the upper Missouri River and at the same time removing the British threat to the Spanish domain.  The plan was to build a series of forts on the Missouri and they hoped eventually to extend the company’s interest west to the Pacific Ocean.

This new company made its first explorations of the river in the fall of 1794, when Jean Baptiste Truteau ascended as far northwest as what would later be central South Dakota.

He and ten men were instructed to go to the Ree (then at the mouth of the Cheyenne River) and then continue on to the Mandans.

Trudeau left St. Louis in June, with his party and goods in a small boat and by the latter part of August, reached the vicinity of Fort Thompson (Crow Creek Agency), without notable incident.  It was here that he met a party of Teton Sioux which contained three families who remembered him from an earlier incident.

They greeted him cordially and wanted to trade.  He refused to trade with them because he had been directed to trade with the Rees.  The Sioux, much displeased, took possession of his goods, selected such things as they needed and paid him in fur what they thought the goods were worth.

Trudeau became angry and escaped.  He was determined to find a place somewhere below the Sioux and above the Omaha where he could pass the winter in peace.

That is how Trudeau ended up on November 11, 1794 in the area that later became Charles Mix County, across from where Fort Randall was established in 1856.  However; for Trudeau, the next five months would not peaceful!

 

Author Clarence Shoemaker, originally published in the Gregory Times-Advocate on June 7, 2023