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Wolf Point is the largest community on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, and the seat of Roosevelt County, Montana. Wolf Point hosts the annual Wild Horse Stampede, the oldest rodeo in Montana, held on the second weekend of July. The Lewis and Clark Expedition passed through the area in May of 1805 and, in the years that followed, fur traders came through the region, with trading posts built along the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers. The first settlement at Wolf Point is uncertain, but an 1834 map shows a notation “Indian Fort” at a location that coincides with Wolf Point’s “Old Town” area, and a Fort Sarpy Journal article published in 1856 makes several references to Wolf Point, as does a diary entry by Major Edwin Hatch written that year. The first non-Indian settlement seems to be in 1875, as William Alderson, and Indian agent, writes in his diary that he brought a crew of workmen and a steam engine operated sawmill to Wolf Point, where a sub-agency for the Assiniboine people was established. Apparently, a small trading post on the banks of the Missouri River grew into a village as permanent houses and buildings were built for the agency, and the Presbyterian Church established a mission school for Indian children there in 1895, which included dormitories. In 1897, the Great Northern Railroad reached eastern Montana, largely replacing steamboat travel, and the railroad established a depot and section house at Wolf Point. The first settled area of Wolf Point, now known as Old Town, was about one mile south of the city’s current center. Upon passage of the Homestead Act, new settlers streamed into Montana, and were able even to homestead on Indian land by paying the government a few dollars an acre. Along Highway 2, Wolf Point is east of Oswego and west of Chelsea, with the Missouri River to the south.

 

 

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