Historical May 1986 report or notice. Original dates, prices and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
Every summer a great number of St. Louisans go north to Michigan and Wisconsin.
If just half of them went to Montana, they would find more home town names than they will ever find east of the Mississippi.
In the halcyon days of Indian traders, Montana was the center of business. Later, when gold and silver were found in the Bitterroots and the ranges around the Judith Basin east of the continental divide, St. Louis mercantilists sent tons of cargo to the miners just as they had done earlier to the fur trappers. It’s all there in the names on the map.
The Interstate between Great Falls and Helena passes through a town named “Agust Choteau.” The name is not spelled correctly, but it is clear to anyone acquainted with St. Louis history.
A little north and some distance west of Great Falls is the town of Choteau.
The oldest county in Montana, with Fort Benton as the county seat, is Chouteau County – this time spelled as St. Louisans are used to seeing it. Fort Benton is, of course, named for one of the leading lawyers of St. Louis, a friend of the old French families, who became the most important senator for the West in the nineteenth century, Thomas Hart Benton.
A name not well known around St. Louis is Bozeman.
The city of Bozeman in Montana is at the end of the Bozeman Trail. Red Cloud, the Sioux chief who led-the great uprising of 1864 when the Bozeman Trail was opened through Yellowstone country, hated that name and the family that bore it.
Not surprisingly, there are still Bozemans in the St. Louis area, although many of them are on the Illinois side.
The purpose of the trail was to shorten the overland distance between St. Louis and the precious metal mines in Montana.
The railroads finally closed that distance and made both the steamboats to Fort Benton and the wagon route through Yellowstone unnecessary.
The first old St. Louis names occur on towns such as Augusta and Pierre, the two oldest Chouteau brothers whose sons inherited their fathers’ names.
After all, it is the Missouri which formed one of the three major reasons Laclede picked the site of St. Louis in 1764 to establish his fur trading post.
The headwaters of the Missouri are just south of Helena and a little north of the small town of Jefferson City.
This “three .rivers country” gets its name from the work of Lewis and Clark.
They named the three small streams which form the Missouri: the Jefferson River, the Gallatin River, and the Madison River.
The heart of the traditional Blackfoot territory, the three rivers country was renowned as the most dangerous fur trapping area until the late 1830’s when disease virtually destroyed the tribes living in the area.
A trip to Montana is not complete without time spent in Judith Basin.
The great artist, Charlie Russell, lived in Great Falls, the largest city in the basin. Russell Boulevard is named for the road which ran from one Russell farm to the other in what is now near south St. Louis. Born in 1864, Charles M. Russell left St. Louis at the age of sixteen and became the Montana Artist.
His work is . clearly among the best of the western artists of the nineteenth century. That he came from St. Louis is not well known here. People in Montana know it; they still think of St. Louis as the largest city in the western part of the east.
A trip to Montana is like a journey into the history of St. Louis.
Not enough St. Louisans drive up the Missouri River and into the historic French and British trapping zone which is now one of the largest states in the Union.
The population of Montana is small; the land is immense.
The trip is well worth it.
Originally published in The Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere, May 1986.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times1986_05.pdf, printed page(s) 7; PDF page(s) 7.
