Fort Hall

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Fort Hall

For other uses, see Fort Hall (disambiguation).

Fort Hall in the United States was a 19th century outpost in the eastern Oregon Country. Constructed as a commercial venture along the Snake River north of present-day Pocatello, Idaho, the fort later became an important stop in the 1840s and 1850s for emigrants along the Oregon Trail and California Trail, which diverged west of the fort.

[edit] History

The idea for the fort arose from a business venture in 1832 by fur trapper Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth and 70 other men. They planned to journey to a rendezvous point near the Snake where they would 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 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^[1]. Hall never traveled west. The fort was completed on July 31, 1834, the only U.S. outpost in the Oregon Country at that time.

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.