Wyeth was an inventor and businessman from Boston, Massachusetts, who also founded a post at Fort William, in present-day Portland, Oregon, as part of a plan for a new trading and fisheries company.

In 1837, unable to compete with the powerful British Hudson's Bay Company, based at Fort Vancouver, Wyeth sold both posts to it.

In the 1860s, Fort Hall was the key post for the overland stage, mail and freight lines to the towns and camps of the mining frontier in the Pacific Northwest.

In the late 1820s, Hall J. Kelley of Boston was among men who became interested in commercial possibilities in the Oregon Country, described by a later historian as offering a "field of exploitation for adventurous capital".

[3] He recruited Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth, an inventor and businessman who had made the ice industry successful in Boston, to his plan to invest in an expedition to the Northwest where they would make their fortunes.

Related plans were to supply trade goods to trappers in the Rocky Mountains and possibly slaughter and dry bison for export to Cuba.

It led back to the North Platte River valley, which was being developed as a key route in connecting the East by a wagon road to the Oregon Country.

The Native Americans had used South Pass, as well as a more northerly trail which they had guided the Lewis and Clark Expedition to follow during their 1804–1806 journey into Oregon and to the Pacific Coast.

It had frequent obstacles, turns and switchbacks, making it difficult for wagon trains, mules and oxen, the common beasts of burden for the emigrants.

In July 1834, Wyeth found that, despite his contract with Milton Sublette of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, its agents at the rendezvous refused to accept his goods.

As he was left with stocks of goods, he advised them of his intention to go west about 150 miles (240 km) to the Snake River country (present-day southeastern Idaho) and try to do business there.

Because of the Oregon boundary dispute between the United States and Great Britain, the region was open to settlement and economic activity, but not any formal claims.

It shut out the independent trapper-trader mountain men and cut severely into the profit margins of the larger American overland fur trading companies—mostly organized in St. Louis.

Having struggled to keep workers and failed to make enough money, in August 1837, Wyeth sold both his forts to the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC).

The settlers were reinforced by the Presidential politics with Democrats demanding a settlement of the "Oregon Question" and proposing a border far to the north of today's boundary between the United States and Canada.

The election year's slogans and bad press, Democratic hawks' control of the U.S. legislatures, the steep decrease in fur market demand, and finally the declaration of war by Mexico over the annexation of their rebel state of Texas all had an accelerating effect greasing the diplomatic wrangling and finally putting an Administration-sponsored treaty before the Senate which set the current boundary, where it was quickly adopted under the wartime congressional session.

In 1846, the Oregon Treaty settled boundaries in the Northwest between Great Britain (Canada) and the United States; Fort Hall was included within the US and its territories.

It was located three miles (5 km) southeast of the original Fort Hall, at the junction of the Salt Lake and Boise roads.

A replica of the original Fort Hall was constructed in the 1960s in Pocatello, about thirty miles (50 km) away, and is operated as a public museum.

This was part of a late-nineteenth century movement to establish residential schools for immersion education of Native American children to learn the English language and European-American culture.