Note 238 — OREGON MISSIONS AN OUTLINE SKETCH OF OREGON TERRITORY AND ITS MISSIONS (continued 2)

These are all fur-trading posts, most of which De Smet had visited. They have been described in previous volumes of our series, as follows: Fort Corbeaux (Crow), or Alexander, our volume xxvii, p. 146, note 12 (De Smet); Laramie (La Ramee), xxi, p. 181, note 30; Union, xxii, p. 373, note 349; Mandan, or Clark (near Big Knife, not Little Missouri), xxii, p. 344, note 317; Pierre, xxii, p. 315, note 277; Lookout, xxii, p. 304, note 261; Vermillion, xxvii, p. 153, note 22 (De Smet); fort at Council Bluffs, xxii, p. 275, note 231; and Bellevue, xxii, p. 267, note 221. Fort Osage, originally a government post on the Missouri (not the Osage), was abandoned in 1827; see our volume v, p. 60, note 31. Probably De Smet here refers to the trading post at the Osage villages on Osage River, in what is now Kansas. Fort Pied-Noir (Blackfoot), or Lewis, was the successor of Fort Mackenzie (for which see our volume xxiii, p. 87, note 75), destroyed in 1844. Fort Lewis was built (1845) by Alexander Culbertson some distance above the old fort at the mouth of Maria’s River, on the south bank of the Missouri, eighteen miles above the present city of Fort Benton, Montana; see account of founding in Montana Historical Society Contributions, iii, pp. 241-243 (note, however, that the dates in these reminiscences are quite unreliable). Fort Lewis, named for the explorer, Captain Meriwether Lewis, was abandoned in 1846 for the site of Fort Benton—the new post, however, retaining the name Lewis until about 1850. Fort Berthold, in McLean County, North Dakota, on the Indian reservation of that name, one hundred and twenty-five miles above Bismarck, was built as an American Fur Company post in 1845, and named for Bartholomew Berthold, one of the partners of that corporation. An opposition post (erected in 1859) was bought out in 1862, and the effects and name transferred thither. This new stockade was nearly captured by the Sioux in December, 1862. Two years later it was converted into a military post, but the soldiers being withdrawn (1867) the fort was thereafter maintained as an Indian agency, until accidentally burned in 1874; all vestiges have now disappeared. See engraving of its former appearance in O. D. Wheeler, Trail of Lewis and Clark (New York, 1904), i, p. 276.—Ed.