Fort Union — Secrets of the Confluence

Your quest begins at the Fort Union Trading Post NHS Visitor Center, opened in 1996. This 5,000 sq ft museum houses thousands of fur trade artifacts from 1829-1867. A precise scale model of the 1850 Fort Union, replicating its 1.5-acre walled compound, reveals the post's layout. It is here, at this historic North Dakota site, that you will collect your first information on trade networks and Native American tribes like the Assiniboine, Crow, and Cree, who gathered here before 1829.

Continue your investigation towards the Bourgeois House, reconstructed between 1987 and 1989 to its original 1830s dimensions. This 38 x 26-foot building, with its twelve rooms on two stories, was Kenneth McKenzie's residence from 1833-1837. The interior is furnished with authentic 1840s trade goods replicas, including over 200 glass beads and metal tools. This building, at the heart of the Fort Union Trading Post National Historic Site, was the nerve center of the American Fur Company's operations, which established this post in 1829 as the most important on the upper Missouri River.

Explore the Palisade Walls and the Ice House. The original 1850 palisades, 15 ft high and with an 1,800 ft perimeter, protected the 4-acre compound. Although no major conflicts were recorded, the fort was a quarantine site during the 1837 smallpox epidemic. The Ice House pit, dug in the 1840s, measured 20x30 ft and stored 100 tons of river ice annually for meat preservation, a crucial logistical asset for this North Dakota post, designated a National Historic Site since 1966.

The Missouri River Overlook Trail, a 0.75-mile loop completed in 1998, leads you to the Confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers. It is here that the 2,341-mile long Yellowstone joins the Missouri, forming a historic trade route. Steamboats, like the Yellow Stone in 1831, revolutionized goods transport, making this site a crucial point for the fur trade. Interpretive signs along the trail, visible from Fort Union, detail the hydrological importance of this crossroads where the Missouri widens significantly, with an average discharge of 15,000 cubic feet/second.

Your journey in Williston, at the heart of North Dakota's heritage, has revealed the scale of the Fort Union Trading Post National Historic Site, a site on the UNESCO Tentative List since 2012. You have walked in the footsteps of the 2,000 Native Americans and traders who gathered here annually during the 1830s trade fairs. This interactive trip into the past has shown you how the fort, abandoned in 1867 due to the decline of the beaver trade, remains a powerful testament to American history, an essential site for understanding the fur trade and the meeting of cultures at the Missouri-Yellowstone Confluence.