Fort Shaw

Barring fur trading posts, the first significant settlements in the territory were the mining camps in southwestern Montana. Everything to the east belonged to the plains Indians and was buffalo country. During the 1860s, the U.S. Army built a string of military posts in Montana to protect the miners and settlers from perceived threats by the Montana Indian tribes. The 13th U.S. Infantry, under the command of Major William Clinton, built Fort Shaw in 1867. It was named for Civil War colonel Robert G. Shaw, who commanded African American troops during the Civil War. He was killed at the Second Battle of Fort Wagner in 1863. Fort Shaw also protected the stage and freight trail from Fort Benton, head of navigation on the Missouri, to the Last Chance Gulch placer diggings at Helena. Everything north of the Sun River was Blackfeet Indian Territory at that time. General Gibbon led troops from here in 1876 to join General Alfred H. Terry and Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer on the Yellowstone just prior to the latter’s fight with the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho Indians at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Decommissioned in 1891, the site then served as an Indian boarding school until 1910. The famed Fort Shaw Indian girls’ basketball team won all but one of its games between 1902 and 1906.