Fort Union Trading Post National Historic Site, near Williston, North Dakota, commemorates the largest and longest-lasting fur-trading post in the continental United States. The American Fur Company, founded by the American businessman John Jacob Astor, established the fort in 1828 to compete with the Hudson’s Bay Company, a British fur-trading company. Astor’s fur companies won an almost complete monopoly of the trade in the United States.
Kenneth McKenzie, the fort’s first bourgeois (commander), supervised the construction of the fort. The fort had an ideal location near the junction of the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers. The Assiniboine and Crow people, who lived nearby, traded bison hides and other furs in exchange for guns, metal products, and other goods. The Arikara, Blackfeet, Chippewa, Cree, Hidatsa, Mandan, and Sioux also visited the fort. Steamboats carried the furs from the fort to St. Louis.
The artists George Catlin of the United States and Karl Bodmer of Switzerland both visited the fort and painted pictures of the buildings and the Native American traders. Other notable visitors to Fort Union include the German explorer Prince Maximilian of Wied; the Belgian missionary Pierre Jean De Smet; the American naturalist John James Audubon; and the frontiersmen Jim Bridger, James P. Beckwourth, and Hugh Glass.
The fur trade declined during the 1860’s. The Northwest Fur Company purchased Fort Union in 1865 but sold it to the U.S. Army two years later. Troops took down all the buildings and used much of the material for construction of a new fort nearby.
The location of Fort Union became a historic site in 1966. In the late 1980’s, the National Park Service began to reconstruct the fort’s buildings on their original foundations. Workers reconstructed McKenzie’s home and office, known as the Bourgeois House, and turned it into a visitor center, museum, and library. The exterior of the house appears as it did during the 1850’s. Visitors to the Indian Trade House can purchase goods from a trader dressed in traditional clothing from the 1830’s.
