In 1832, Joseph La Barge, then only seventeen years old, was working on steamboats on the Mississippi River and was present at the Indian battle of Bad Axe, Wisconsin.  During that same year he came over to the Missouri River and began learning its odd and peculiar habits which challenged the captains of the early steamers that ventured into what would become Dakota Territory.

La Barge was anxious to prepare himself for the profession of a riverboat pilot.  For those who were thoroughly trained for it, being the pilot of a steamer was the most important and highly lucrative job on the Missouri River.

His first trip on the Missouri was on the steamboat Yellowstone in 1833.  It had been built in Pittsburgh in 1827, and was the first steamboat to engage in the upper Missouri trade.  She was built and owned by the American Fur Company, of St. Louis, Pierre Choteau, president, and was commanded in 1832 by Captain Young.  The Yellowstone was laden with miscellaneous merchandise designed for trading purposes with the Indians.

This boat went up the river to the mouth of the Yellowstone River, the trip taking all summer.  In those days and for some time afterwards steamboats were of a primitive character, both in appearance and construction, being of very heavy draft, leaving St. Louis drawing five and six feet of water.  The early steamboats were very narrow, had single engines, side wheels, and were very hard to manage.

Still the trip of the Yellowstone was made, but with a lot of very hard work.  The Yellowstone ran back to St. Louis and up the river once more that fall, and La Barge spent the winter with Cabanne, a fur trader, who was located in the neighborhood of the present site of Omaha.

The Yellowstone continued to run on the Missouri during the year 1833 and 1834, and during this latter year the company sold her and built a new boat called the Assiniboine, named after the Indian tribe or the river of that name in Western Canada.

She was commanded by Captain Pratt.  She made a very successful trip, but in 1835 she was burned about three miles below where Fort Abraham Lincoln was afterwards built near Bismark.  There was no insurance, and the company lost about seventy-five thousand dollars in furs which ($2,707,423 today).  They had put all of their fine furs on the steamer, thinking they would be safer there than on the Mackinaw boats.

La Barge was now a licensed pilot and a young man of high character.  He was made captain of the company’s boat as well as pilot, in which employment he continued for thirty years, and never lost a boat.  In 1839 he built his first steamboat for the Missouri trade and during the succeeding thirty-five years built fifteen steamboats, the last one being the John M. Chambers, and the first stern-wheeler he constructed.  He was convinced that a stern-wheeler was better adapted to the Missouri River than any other kind of boat, and unquestionably the best style for navigating the Yellowstone River.

Steamboating was very profitable in the early days, according to Captain La Barge.  The passenger boats on the Missouri River from 1864 to 1869 were the finest and most substantial ever built.  They cost from one hundred and ten to one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars each ($2,225,720 to $2,529,227 today).

They were not as large as some of the Mississippi boats, but in all their furnishings and accommodations, including the table, they were unexcelled.  People demanded floating palaces and would not travel on an ordinary steamboat if they could possibly avoid it.

La Barge recalled a number of trading posts along the river in the years 1833 to 1840.

He especially remembered and mentioned one called Fort Vermillion which was located just below the mouth of the Vermillion River.  It was a large and  prosperous  establishment.

The beginning of navigation on the Missouri River refers to the time when vessels propelled by steam power first began to plow its waters.  Proceeding that period by one-hundred years, travel on the rivers was by large mackinaw boats propelled by oars and drawn with the aid of ropes by men or animals, carrying tons of freight and an ample crew, transporting merchandise from the mouth to the head of navigation near the Great Falls, a distance by river of about three thousand miles

Steamboat traffic on the upper Missouri, which was inaugurated in 1830 by Pierre Choteau with the steamboat Assiniboine, did not exhibit any notable increase for the following twenty years.  There was not a sufficient increase of business to demand it.

The Harney expedition of 1855 and the building of Fort Randall in 1856 – 57 gave temporary employment to a number of the vessels, especially between Yankton and the fort.  The fur trade was the only substantial industry at the time, was amply accommodated by scores of mackinaws, a few itinerant traders with ponies, and the occasional trips of steamboats that made voyages as far up as Fort Union.  This was expected to be the head of steam navigation for a number of years.  Above Fort Union, transportation by river was furnished altogether by mackinaws which were used in the interior of North America during the fur trading era.

The common origin of all Mackinaw boats was the Native American canoe.

 

 

Author Author Clarence Shoemaker, originally published in the Gregory Times-Advocate on April 9, 2025