Sunday, June 23
Journey from Medora, ND to Fort Peck, MT
Today, we leave North Dakota and drive across eastern Montana.
We left Medora on I-94, but shortly after crossing into Montana, we drove down two-lane roads across the desolate terrain of eastern Montana, with its expansive plains and rolling hills.
Around Lindsey, we counted almost a thousand-grain train cars parked on the railroad tracks. The cars were separated only when the tracks crossed a road. We later learned that these cars were parked awaiting the harvest season.
The landscape around Fort Peck is dominated by Fort Peck Lake, the largest reservoir in Montana, created by the Fort Peck Dam on the Missouri River.
Downstream Campground
We had reservations at the Downstream Campground, just below Fort Peck Dam along the Missouri River. This Corps of Engineer campground had 86 sites, with 71 having electrical hookups. Our site only had electricity, so we had to fill our water tank before parking. It is nestled among mature cottonwood trees, but there is little privacy.
Fort Peck
After setting up the camper, we headed to Fort Peck. Despite having just over 200 people, the town has a fascinating history.
Fort Peck started as a Durfee and Peck trading post along the Missouri River in 1867. It was a 12-foot-tall cottonwood-log stockade with low buildings inside, built on a narrow shale ledge about 35 feet above the river. Its rear wall was against the hillside, and the front was close enough to the ledge to serve as a landing for sternwheelers going upstream. It had a near-monopoly on trade with the Sioux and Assiniboine people for a while, competing with Fort Union in North Dakota. In 1873, it became the Indian Agency for the Assiniboine and Gros Ventre Indians. However, in 1877, the Missouri River flooded and destroyed the stockade.
The current town of Fort Peck is about two miles north of the original site. In 1933, it became the headquarters for constructing and operating the massive Fort Peck Dam. The next year, the Army Corps of Engineers designed a government-owned town with administrative headquarters, a hospital, stores, a theater, a recreation hall, and other facilities. The small village still has several buildings listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
Northeast Montana Veterans Memorial
Montanans represented the highest per capita participation during WWII and suffered the second-highest percentage of combat deaths in the nation. More than nine thousand men and women resident to this Northeast region have served in uniform, and approximately three hundred gave their lives in service to our country, with many more suffering debilitating wounds, loss of limb, and mental scars.
The Northeast Montana Veterans Memorial in Fort Peck was dedicated on July 4, 2016. The park features a 38-foot-high main monument, ten Walls of Honor, pathways, and three significant sculptures:
“Taps”: A life-sized bronze sculpture of an Army bugler playing Taps.
“Flag Draped Casket”: A bronze representation honoring fallen soldiers.
“Eagle”: A bronze sculpture symbolizing freedom and the spirit of the nation. The eagle with wide-spread wings stands guard over a circular pathway.
In October 2022, the memorial was enhanced with Gold Star casualty marble slabs installed on the inside of the memorial’s pillars. These slabs honor 494 service members from World War I to the present, representing the nine northeastern Montana counties.
Residents and sponsors funded, constructed and maintained the park without state or federal funding.
Fort Peck Theater
The Fort Peck Theatre was built as a temporary structure for a movie theatre. The theater was designed in a pseudo-Swiss-chalet style as an amenity for the 50,000 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers workers and their families at the Fort Peck Dam project. The interior features open-truss wood construction, with handcrafted light fixtures fabricated in Corps of Engineers workshops. The building includes a stage, a 1209-seat auditorium, a lounge, a foyer, a lobby, a manager’s office, and four dressing rooms. This historical theater survived to become a permanent facility and, in 2008, is used as a community theater.
We bought some tickets for the local production of Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat at 4 p.m. that afternoon. We had seen the play, but we wanted the experience of watching a show in a historical theater. The theater was full at show time, and the show was excellent, though it was a community theater with many audience members related to a person in the cast. The snack bar was outside, so most of the audience was on the lawn during intermission, catching up with each other. Several elderly women ran the snack bar, and there were a lot of different snacks, and the prices were surprisingly low. The crowd’s favorite choice was popsicles, as it was a beautiful warm day.
The Gateway Club Restaurant
After the show, we drove over to the Gateway Restaurant, which was packed. You sat yourself, and we were lucky to get a table. The waitresses were too few and too busy. They had a nice patio area overlooking the reservoir, but it was packed, so we had an inside table near the bar. When our waitress finally greeted us, she warned us that most of their menu items were unavailable because they had not received their “bun” order that day. The paper menu they gave us had almost half the items crossed off.
We ordered some Jeremiah Johnson’s Pale Ale from a Great Falls Brewery and pizza, which seemed to be their specialty. The waitress was friendly, and the atmosphere reflected that it was a local favorite. We enjoyed our dinner.
Monday, June 24
Fort Peck Interpretive Center
We drove along the Fort Peck Dam and then to the Fort Peck Interpretive Center. This large center, a cooperative effort between the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, offers visitors a comprehensive exploration of the region’s natural history, wildlife, and the monumental Fort Peck Dam.
Some highlights include several fossils, including Peck’s Rex, a life-size model, and skeleton cast of a Tyrannosaurus rex discovered near Fort Peck in 1997. It is home to Montana’s two largest aquariums, showcasing fish species from Fort Peck Lake and the Missouri River. Other displays included the diverse fauna of the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge and Fort Peck Lake, as well as artifacts, pictures, and narratives detailing the construction and significance of the Fort Peck Dam.
Fort Peck Dam
When we left the Interpretive Center, we drove around the dam area and viewed the dam from several different viewpoints.
When President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the Fort Peck project in 1933, thousands of people from all over the country migrated to Montana during the Great Depression in hopes of earning a living. More than 7,000 men and women signed on to work on the dam in 1934 and 1935. Employment peaked at nearly 11,000 dam workers in 1936, and thousands more swarmed to Montana to set up support businesses. More than eighteen boomtowns sprang up in the vicinity, and the “wild west” was reborn as a tiny and obscure township swelled from a population of a few hundred to nearly 40,000 people.
New techniques had to be learned and developed as rapidly as ingenuity would allow. Countless technical problems arose and were solved. A shipyard created on site quickly turned out the “Fort Peck Navy,” which would dredge the river bottom and pump the slurry that formed the dam. Workers overcame a massive slide in 1938. The last load of material was dumped in October 1940, almost seven years to the day after FDR’s authorization.
Fort Peck Lake is 134 miles long and has over 1,500 miles of shoreline. The dam consists of an earthen embankment, an outlet tunnel for releasing stored water, two powerhouses, and 16 gates on a concrete-lined spillway to the west of the dam.
Valley County Pioneer Museum
The Valley County Pioneer Museum in nearby Glasgow displays a progressive history of Valley County and its people with authentic artifacts woven into historic displays. These displays include the Chief First to Fly Indian collection, the country’s largest Assiniboine collection, railroad and agriculture, the creation of the Fort Peck Dam, Lewis and Clark, and stories from the Titanic, dioramas, murals, pictures of pioneers, and the Stan Kalinski room with an ornate cherry wood bar and a collection of 220 animal and bird mounts. A machinery lot across the street boasts many remnants of an earlier day.
The main museum was self-guided, but we were guided to a separate building that resembled a 1915 town and an original 1924 catalog home used by a local pioneer family.
One unique touch was that some donated items had donors’ notes explaining their backstory.
Leo Coleman Wildlife Park
When we returned to the Fort Peck area, we looked for the 230-acre Leo Coleman Wildlife Park. Google Maps took us to the wrong place, and we only found a faded, leaning sign pointing to a “Wildlife Pasture.” After driving around on some gravel roads, we eventually found some bison and a couple of mule deer.
After enjoying the animals, we continued back to the camper for the evening.