Camp Cooke also known as Fort Claggett[3] was a U.S. Army military post on the Missouri River in Montana Territory.
The boats carried passengers and freight to supply swiftly growing boom towns at the site of rich gold strikes in the western mountains of the Montana Territory.
Detachments from Camp Cooke guarded major transportation routes in Southwestern Montana, including the roads between Fort Benton and Helena.
Camp Cooke was abandoned less than four years after it was built on March 31, 1870, in response to constant well-founded complaints that the location of the post was too remote.
The primary access route to the gold fields was up the Missouri River by steamboat to the head of navigation at Fort Benton.
These lands were occupied by the Blackfoot, Gros Ventre, Assiniboine, Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Crow tribes.
In reaction, the Indians retaliated by mounting small scale, scattered, guerrilla type attacks and raids.
As reports of thefts of livestock and killings by Indians accumulated, the newspapers that had sprung up in the swiftly growing mining and trading communities of the Montana Territory demanded that the U.S. Army provide protection.
In response the army established Camp Cooke on the Missouri River in the Montana Territory on July 10, 1866.
[4] Downstream from Camp Cooke was the Dauphine Rapids, which were difficult-to-impossible to traverse after the river began to fall after the spring floods.
Because of its isolation Camp Cooke was abandoned on 31 March 1870, although a rapidly growing infestation of rats at the post helped prompt the decision.
The Missouri Breaks have resisted settlement and so the site of Camp Cooke remains remote to this day.
Huckabee, Rodger Lee, "Camp Cooke: The First Army Post in Montana – Success and Failure on the Missouri" (2010).