Montana and Missouri—The Fur Connection
"In the first half of the 19th Century, the fur trade was as big a business as there was in the Montana Territory."
As the crow flies, the two states of Montana and Missouri are 518 miles apart. That’s from the southeast corner of the former to the northwest corner of the latter. That’s a fair distance, but thanks to one of its 56 counties, Montana’s connection to Missouri is closer than you might think.
Chouteau County, once the largest county in the Montana Territory and the second biggest in the entire U.S. before it was chopped up more than a hundred years ago, takes its name from Pierre Chouteau of St. Louis, Missouri. So does the town of Choteau in Teton County, though for some reason, the folks there dropped the “u.”
The seat of Chouteau County is Fort Benton, named for a famous U.S. Senator from Missouri, Thomas Hart Benton. I explained that interesting historical detail in this essay last May. By the way, if you drove by car from Ft. Benton, MT, to St. Louis, MO, you’d log almost 1,500 miles.
The Chouteau brothers, Pierre and Auguste, were born in St. Louis, a city co-founded by an earlier Chouteau in 1764. The family business was the fur trade, and that’s what brought them to the Montana Territory. In 1847 they established a post for trading furs with local tribes and trappers, a post that a few years later became Fort Benton.
In the first half of the 19th Century, the fur trade was as big a business as there was in the Montana Territory. Montana’s earliest development can be partially credited to the pursuit of pelts. Historian K. Ross Toole explained in his 1959 book, Montana: An Uncommon Land, “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” by folks in the fur business.
Much of this is undoubtedly known to many residents of Chouteau County. What is mostly forgotten is that furs (mostly beaver, muskrat and otter pelts) were the genesis of America’s first government-owned enterprise. It was a bad idea of our great first President, George Washington, and proved to be yet another case of good intentions plus other people’s money yielding financial disaster.
President Washington noticed in the 1790s that private entrepreneurs like John Jacob Astor were building fortunes in the fur business and establishing commercial relations with Native Americans in the process. Washington believed it was in the national interest for the government to get in on the action. He wanted a counterweight to British fur traders in the Great Lakes area, who he feared might win over the loyalties of Indians and thwart U.S. expansion westward.
In 1795, Congress agreed with Washington and began subsidizing a network of warehouses to store goods that government agents would trade with the fur-trapping Indians. The subsidy grew year after year, ultimately to six times the initial taxpayer investment.
Private entrepreneurs like Astor and his company also traded with the Indians. However, instead of building warehouses and expecting the Indians to bring their furs there to trade, those private entrepreneurs hired agents to live with the Indians. They brought goods the Indians wanted—such as kettles, muskets, whiskey, and axes—but the government stocked its warehouses with stuff they thought the Indians should have (but didn’t want) such as hoes, plows, and linens.
The bureaucrats in the federal fur operation even tried to get Congress to ban their private competitors but Congress wasn’t that stupid. Not yet anyway.
While the private fur business flourished, the federal government’s operations lost huge sums of cash regularly. Who do you think the Indians preferred to trade with—the profit-motivated agents in their midst who offered what they wanted, or the subsidized bureaucrats who offered junk in a fort a hundred miles away?
If Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy were around back then, no doubt their Department of Government Efficiency would have shut down the federal fur fiasco at the drop of a hat. Congress finally ended it in the early 1820s and investigated the government warehouses. To the astonishment of many, it found amongst the inventory more than a thousand Jew’s harps, an obscure musical instrument that idiots working for the government thought they could pawn off on the Indians in exchange for pelts. Congress auctioned off everything connected to its fur business, generating a fraction of the original cost.
By the time the fur trade receded in the 1850s, Auguste Chouteau had died and his brother Pierre moved on to buffalo hides and then railroads and mines. Their original Fort Benton site proved to be the last fur trading post on the Upper Missouri River.
Pierre died a wealthy man in 1865, and he did it all on his own dime, unsubsidized to the end.
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Lawrence W. Reed writes a monthly column for the Frontier Institute in Helena, on whose board he serves. He is president emeritus of the Foundation for Economic Education and blogs at www.lawrencewreed.com.