On July 12, 1879, Captain Charles Howell of the Corps of Engineers boarded the steamboat Miner at Sioux City.  He was determined to go far up the Missouri to Fort Benton, Montana, to make a government survey of the river.  The Civil War veteran already had some idea of the river’s power and impulsiveness.

Only two weeks earlier, high water kept him from reaching Omaha, Nebraska, in time to meet another vessel.  The Miner had also experienced a near miss.  Just below Sioux City, a violent eddy caught the steamer, spun it around, and swept the deck clean.  Two crewmen drowned.

Several military explorers had preceded Howell on the river.  First came Meriwether Lewis and William Clark.  They had been sent by President Jefferson to explore the Missouri River, the Rocky Mountains and eventually reach the Pacific Ocean in what is now Oregon.

After them came the engineers.  In 1819, Stephen Long and an expedition chugged up the river in a sternwheeler as far as Council Bluffs, Iowa.  Lieutenant John C. Fremont and his French mentor, Joseph Nicollet, went upstream twenty years later.  In the 1850’s, Lieutenant Governor K. Warren examined parts of the Missouri, and parties of railroad surveyors walked its banks, noted the good crossings, and recorded the gentle slopes as the plains rose to meet the mountains.

Although a long line of explorers had preceded Howell, the circumstances of his journey set it apart from those of his predecessors.  Gold had been discovered in Montana during the Civil War, and the rush was on.  The Missouri River, once the main artery of the fur trade, became a bonanza trail.

Fort Benton changed almost overnight from a sleepy outpost at the head of navigation to the commercial hub of the new El Dorado.  While only six steamboats had fought their way up to Fort Benton in 1864, seventy did so three years later, and steam-boating on the Upper Missouri became a million-dollar business.

The boost provided to Missouri River commerce by the gold rush was sustained into the 1870’s by the expanding military activity along the upper Missouri.  The War Department built a number of forts along the river, and the Army conducted significant military operations in the area for several years.  Montana newspapers in February of 1879 were reporting that Fort Benton expected a “brisk boating season that summer.”

Although river traffic in the trans-Mississippi West as a whole continued to decline, which had begun during the Civil War, the level of activity on the Missouri remained high.  The great increase in traffic on the upper river fired interest in improvement of navigation.  This is what brought Howell to Sioux City.

He spent nearly three months on the Miner, whose name called to mind the gold rush but whose captain represented the Northwestern Fur Company, examining the variety of obstructions to navigation – sandbars, rapids, snags, and rocks.  His report, which recommended removal of obstacles and deepening of the channel, marked the beginning of Government efforts to facilitate transportation on the upper Missouri.

The Missouri would give those who sought to ease the way for commerce quite a lot to do.  The Nation’s longest river, it stretched almost 2,500 miles from its source in western Montana at the confluence of the Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin Rivers, a place now called Three Forks.

The Missouri flows northeastward through Montana for about 150 miles, turns east, and crosses the state to North Dakota and its junction with the Yellowstone.  Along the way the Missouri picks up the water of the Marias, Musselshell, Milk, and Teton Rivers.  Eastward it runs until midway through North Dakota, where it turns to meet the Knife River.

The rest of the way through the Dakotas is southeastward, augmented by a series of streams that run west to east, among them the Heart, Cannonball, Cheyenne, White, and Niobrara.  At present-day Sioux City, the course becomes more southerly.  The river becomes the border between Nebraska and Iowa, then separates Kansas and Missouri.  Finally, it turns east, splits the State of Missouri, and empties into the Mississippi at St. Louis.

By the time that Captain Howell came to the Missouri, the Corps of Engineers had at least an acquaintance with the lower reaches of the river.  As the agency charged by Congress with improvement of navigable waters, the Corps had made intermittent efforts to remove snags as early as 1832.  These efforts resumed after the Civil War.  In 1868, Colonel John N. Macomb assumed responsibility for the work as Superintendent of Western Rivers.  Successors, Captains William F. Reynolds and James H. Simpson, continued the effort into the 1870’s.

Major Charles R. Suter, who followed Simpson to the western rivers job in 1873, picked up where Captain Howell had left off on the Missouri.  Suter faced an immense task.  His office in St. Louis dealt with obstructions on the lower Mississippi and Arkansas Rivers as well as the Missouri.  His work on the Missouri, which extended over a decade in various capacities, involved several specific improvements as well as a general investigation of the river up to Sioux City and development of a long-range program to aid navigation.

 

Author Author Clarence Shoemaker, originally published in the Gregory Times-Advocate on June 4, 2025