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abled it to establish dominance in that operational theater, wrest
the lucrative Piikani trade from Canadian competitors, and tran-
sition seamlessly to the burgeoning bison robe trade. Almost
from its inception, Pierre Chouteau, Jr. utilized this innovation
to support and subsidize artists, as well as fledgling scientific
disciplines, such as anthropology and geology. The works of
Catlin, Maximilian, Bodmer, Audubon and Kurz are notable by-
products of this policy.
Nevertheless, the impact of steamboat traffic on the upper
Missouri was not entirely benign. During the first half of the
nineteenth century, consumption of firewood by steamboats
was, according to environmental historian Andrew Isenberg,
"probably the [main] cause of riparian deforestation in the Unit-
ed States." A phenomenon that was especially problematic on
the sparsely timbered Northern Plains, historian Donald Jack-
son contextualizes its detrimental effect superbly. Jackson esti-
mates that, on its 1833 voyage to Fort Pierre and back, the Yellow
Stone burned "the equivalent of 1,700 oak trees that might have
been growing for half a century." Finally, and most tragically,
the steamer St. Peter's carried an invisible and insidious cargo
upstream during the spring of 1837; it spread the smallpox virus
from Fort Clark to Fort Union, thus unleashing the benchmark
epidemic in Montana history.
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"Pehriska-ruhpa, Moennitarri [Hidatsa] warrior in the costume of the dog
dance," March 1834. Portrait by Karl Bodmer. National Anthropological
Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Negative Number 43,170.
Bodmer's Mandan
and Hidatsa portraits
CONSTITUTE THE VERY FINEST
OF AN EXTRAORDINARY BODY OF WORK.
