Fur trade in Montana

[4] These traders competed not only in trapping fur-bearing animals, particularly the American beaver, but also in arranging trade relations with the many indigenous groups in the region, hoping to corner the market on these rich resources.

For their part, the region's indigenous groups – particularly the Piegan (often called "Blackfeet" in the USA), the Crow, and the Salish and Kootenai – struggled to maintain control of their own lands and resources which supported their people and way of life.

Over time, as a distinct fur trade society evolved around company-operated outposts, cross-cultural sexual relationships and marriages became commonplace between Euro-American men and women from various tribal communities.

[9] Notable individuals include Natawista[10] (also known as Natoapxíxina, Na-ta-wis-ta-cha and Natoyist-Siksina[11]), who in 1840 married Major Alexander Culbertson, then the head of Fort Union, and Wambdi Autepewin, a Lakota woman widely known for her skills as a mediator.

[7] Countless others, however, produced necessary articles of clothing and food; prepared skins and tanned hides for market; offered their knowledge of local ecologies and geographies; and became inextricably involved in the multicultural exchange of the trade.

[12] Even while Lewis and Clark struggled to make their way up and over the Rocky Mountains in the summer of 1805, a French Canadian trapper working for the North West Company, François Antoine Larocque explored part of the Yellowstone River drainage in what became southeastern Montana looking to arrange trading relations with Native Americans in the area, especially the Crow.

[13] Though his expedition succeeded, Larocque's long-term plans ultimately failed due to the difficulties of competing with the Hudson's Bay Company and aggressive American fur traders.

The first American fur post established in the region now known as Montana was completed in November 1807, and located at the confluence of the Yellowstone and Big Horn rivers by Manuel Lisa and his party of traders.

[22] Henry and Ashley's trappers included Jim Bridger, Jedediah Strong Smith, and David Edward Jackson, and eventually William Sublette[24] and James Beckwourth.

[23] Smith and some other men had continued up the Missouri to the mouth of the Musselshell River in central Montana where they camped and trapped through the winter and spring, without any notable encounters with indigenous groups.

[26] The next year, Smith and his partners sold out to Thomas Fitzpatrick, Baptiste Gervais, Jim Bridger, Milton Sublette and Henry Fraeb, who took the name Rocky Mountain Fur Company and set out with 200 men into the Great Falls area.

Scotsman Kenneth McKenzie, intent on breaking into the Upper Missouri—the elusive prize of the Western fur trade—established what became Fort Union near the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers.

[33] As Montana historian K. Ross Toole put it, "Before the emigrant's wagon ever rolled a mile, before the miner found his first color, before the government authorized a single road or trail, this inhospitable land had been traversed and mapped.