Pj^.^aisf" HISTORIC SITES ARCHEOLOGY — MATTES 15 



Bottoms." There was virtually no surface evidence of this post, which 

 had been laid out on a rather ambitious scale, only to be completely 

 dismantled upon its abandonment, and the materials used at Fort 

 Kandall, 100 miles downstream. Af-ter careful search, however, Garth 

 located a concentration of military debris and accouterments on a 

 slope about 200 yards back from the river bank, which was probably 

 a dump. The fact that the military post site proved to be a few feet 

 above maximum reservoir pool level, coupled with the multiplicity 

 of other problems, led to the abandonment of this particular effort. 



Research indicated that Fort Lookout trading post had a disconcert- 

 ingly checkered career. It was established by the Columbia Fur Co. 

 in 1822 and the following year it figured in the historic Asliley- 

 Leavenworth expedition against the Arikara (Wilson and De Land, 

 1902; Chittenden, 1936, pp. 325-329; Frost, 1945, p. 37; Morgan, 1953, 

 pp. 59-77). In 1825 it was the scene of a grand parley between the 

 Sioux and members of the Atkinson-O'Fallon diplomatic expedition 

 (Eeid and Gannon, 1929, pp. 21-23). About this same time Fort 

 Lookout (which, contrary to another common assumption, is identi- 

 fiable with the "Fort Kiowa" of the fur traders) was taken over by the 

 American Fur Co. In 1833 it appears in the journals of Prince Maxi- 

 milian as an adjmict of the Upper Missouri or Sioux Indian Agency; 

 at this same time Maximilian describes a second Fort Lookout or 

 "French Post" a few miles downriver (Wied-Neuwied, 1906, p. 303). 

 During the 1840's a "Fort Lookout" was occupied in desultory fashion 

 hj La Barge and other latter-day, small-time traders (Chittenden, 

 1903, p. 59 ; Mattes, 1949, pp. 540-541.) 



Garth's explorations settled two things : first, that there was a trad- 

 ing post site on the river bank nearby, but not coincident with, the 

 Fort Lookout military post ; second, that the dimensions of this trad- 

 ing post were too small to identify it as the historic Fort Lookout- 

 Fort Kiowa of 1825, hence it was the "French Post" Fort. Lookout 

 of 1833, or La Barge's Fort Lookout of the 1840's. 



What happened to the famous Fort Lookout of 1825? After a 

 most intensive reconnaissance of the Fort Hale Bottoms, coupled 

 with a careful analysis of river meanders, Garth concluded that the 

 Fort Lookout site of 1825 had been destroyed by river action. If 

 Maximilian's Fort Lookout (alias Sioux Agency) of 1833 were identi- 

 cal with the fort of 1825, then it too had disappeared. Subsequent 

 investigations were to substantiate this finding. 



To minimize the confusion, the writer now holds to this solution 

 of the Fort Lookout tangle : 



Fort Lookout I Alias Fort Kiowa, the post of 1823-25, apparently 



destroyed by river action. 

 Fort Lookout II Maximilian's "French Post" of 1833, probably 



identical with La Barge's post of the 1840's, 



discovered by Garth in 1950. 



