The Tongue River

Captain Wm.Clark and ten others camped near the mouth of the Tongue River on July 29, 1806. Clark noted the great number of buffalo in the area and reported that the river was so muddy and warm that it was “very disagreeable to drink.” Clark referred to the river by its Mandan or Hidatsa name, “Lazeka.” Construction of Fort Keogh, named for one of Custer’s captains killed at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, began in 1877. That knob off to the south is Signal Butte. During the Indian wars the army flashed sun mirror messages to a post in the Black Hills 175 miles away. A cloudy day sure threw a lot of static into that pioneer wireless system. Miles City, named after General Nelson A. Miles, started in 1877 as a shack and tent town with a population running largely to prospectors and miners from the Black Hills, buffalo hunters, traders and gamblers. She was wild for a while. When the cattle days of the 1880s arrived many a Texas trail herd came through here and the city soon acquired a national reputation as a cattle and horse market which it has never relinquished.