Everything about Fort Hall totally explained
Fort Hall was a 19th century outpost in the eastern
Oregon Country, part of the present-day
United States, and is located in
Fort Hall, Idaho. It was considered the "most significant of all pioneer institutions in the West" by noted historian Merrill D. Beal. Fort Hall was constructed as a commercial venture, situated on the
Snake River north of present-day
Pocatello,
Idaho. It became an important stop in the
1840s and
1850s for an estimated 270,000 emigrants along the
Oregon Trail and
California Trail, which diverged west of the fort.
History
The idea for the fort arose in 1832, as a business venture conceived by
fur trapper Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth and 70 other men. They planned to journey to a
rendezvous point at Pierre's Hole near the Snake where they'd sell goods to mountain men and fur trappers. They planned to use the profits from the rendezvous to establish a fishery on the
Columbia River, exporting
salmon to
New England and
Hawaii.
The business venture proved to be troublesome. After arriving at the rendezvous, Wyeth and his men found that their goods sold poorly. As a back-up plan, they constructed the wooden Fort Hall on a nearby site to sell off their excess goods. Wyeth named the fort after a major investor in the enterprise, Henry Hall, a partner of the Boston firm Tucker & Williams & Henry Hall. Hall never traveled west. The fort was completed on
July 31,
1834, the only U.S. outpost in the Oregon Country at that time. While Fort Hall was under construction Wyeth continued on towards the Columbia River with other members of his company and escorted Methodist missionary
Jason Lee on his way to start the
Methodist Mission in the
Willamette Valley. Once Wyeth reached the lower Columbia he built
Fort William to serve as the rendezvous point.
In August 1837 Wyeth sold the fort to the
Hudson's Bay Company, which controlled the fur trade in the Oregon Country from their headquarters at
Fort Vancouver on the Columbia. The company raised the
British flag over the fort and used the outpost to actively discourage U.S. emigrants from continuing westward. Emigrants who arrived at the fort were shown the abandoned wagons of those who had come before them and who had continued westward with their animals on foot. In 1843, Dr.
Marcus Whitman, a
missionary who had established a mission near present-day
Walla Walla, Washington, led a wagon train westward from the fort. In the following years the number of wagon trains grew sharply and the fort became a welcome stop along the trail for thousands of emigrants. It also remained an important trading post for mountain men and the
Native Americans of the region, in particular the
Shoshone. The fort found itself located in the United States in 1846 following the
Oregon Treaty.
By 1863 the wooden fort had decayed completely. A replica was constructed in the
1960s in Pocatello and is now operated as a public museum. The original site is located at
Fort Hall in the
Fort Hall Indian Reservation.
It was declared a
National Historic Landmark in 1961.
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