Qualla: Fort Berthold

Fort Berthold: Introduction

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The forts that bore Bartholomew Berthold's name lie somewhere beneath Lake Sakakawea, lost since the 1950s when the Garrison Dam drowned the Missouri River bottomlands. Berthold himself never saw them. He died in St. Louis in 1831, fourteen years before the American Fur Company named its upper Missouri outpost in his honor. The Italian immigrant had married into the Chouteau fur-trading dynasty, anglicized his name from Bertolla de Moncenigo, and built a mansion that would later serve as headquarters for pro-Confederate secessionists. His frontier namesakes would pass through fire and flood before vanishing beneath government-made waters.

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Fort Berthold: The First Fort Falls

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The American Fur Company founded the original Fort Berthold in 1845 on the upper Missouri, initially calling it Fort James before renaming it the following year for the deceased St. Louis merchant who had once been part of their trading network. For seventeen years the post serve...

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Fort Berthold: A Second Life

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Four years before the first fort burned, trader Charles Larpenteur had built an independent post called Fort Atkinson on the Missouri south of present-day White Shield, North Dakota. When the American Fur Company lost their original facility, they purchased Larpenteur's fort and ...

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Fort Berthold: From Army Post to Indian Agency

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

When responsibility for Native American relations shifted from the War Department to the Department of the Interior, the second Fort Berthold found a new purpose. After 1868 it served as the Indian Agency for the Arikara, Hidatsa, and Mandan peoples, three distinct nations admini...

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Fort Berthold: The Waters Rise

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Garrison Dam changed everything. Completed in 1953, the massive earthen structure created Lake Sakakawea, one of the largest man-made reservoirs in the United States. The flooding claimed both fort sites, erasing any physical trace of the structures that had shaped regional h...

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Fort Berthold: What Remains

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Nothing visible survives of either Fort Berthold today. The waters of Lake Sakakawea cover both locations, their exact positions known only from historical records and old maps. The Fort Berthold Indian Reservation still exists, home to the Three Affiliated Tribes formed from the...

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