Talk to old timers about Fort Assinniboine and the first thing you learn is how to spell Assinniboine (3 n's if you please). The next thing you learned was how shocked the towns around Fort Assinniboine were that this brand new state of the art base and huge military reservation was going to be closed while many much older bases stayed open. Back then, like today, there was no figuring out what the Government was going to do next.
I was always told that Fort Assinniboine was built in Montana Territory because of the confluence of three events. When General Custer was killed at the Little Big Horn, that frightened people that Native Americans were gaining a hold in this part of the country. Then when the Chief Joseph campaign ended just north of the Bear Paw Mountains, which made people even more uneasy about what was happening in this part of the west.
Third, there were tens of thousands of people who wanted to move west and take advantage of free lands. And there were many like Jim Hill who wanted to build railroads to haul people from one side of the United States to the other side.
So, in 1879 this huge army base sprang out of the prairie in one summer season. Native Americans reported seeing just prairie when they headed north to hunt. In the fall when they returned along the same route, there were all these huge brick buildings and some 600 men manning this state of the art operation.
Many of the materials coming to Fort Assinniboine came up the Missouri by steamboat and were then driven overland from Coal Banks landing to the site of Fort Assinniboine, a low knoll in the middle of the prairie with Beaver Creek, coming out of the Bear Paw Mountains next to the installation to supply water needs.
Bricks for buildings were made at the site, bricks for fireplaces and chimneys were bought from the Kessler Brickworks Company in Helena and most everything else was brought by boat and then overland.
The buildings at Fort Assinniboine were set on all four sides of a large parade ground. Enlisted men lived in large dormitories on one side of the parade ground. Across from them were officers, both married and unmarried. At one end of the parade ground was a building for the Post band, a chapel and in the middle a large hospital. On the other end of the parade ground was the library building, the Post trader's store and a large post jail. Behind all of these buildings were stables and buildings to house what needed to be on the base at all times? Going down the hill to Beaver Creek there were several large underground rooms to keep produce fresh during the winter. Ice was made from a dam on Beaver Creek for summer consumption.
Outhouses were state of the art for the time. They were inside rooms and the toilets had compartments underneath them that could be dumped out once a day or whenever. Some of those compartments are still in existence at the Fort.
When Fort Assinniboine was closed around 1907 there was a great question as to what to do with the buildings at the Fort and what to do with the vast land holdings.
Land holdings first. Some of the land went to form the Rocky Boy Reservation, the smallest of the seven Native American Reservations in Montana. Two landless tribes of Native Americans shared the new reservation. There was Chief Rocky Boy of the Chippewa Tribe and Little Bear of the Cree tribe. The Crees were from Canada and decided to move to Montana after they had fought on the side of Louis Riel and the Riel Rebellion. The other Tribe, the Chippewa were from Minnesota and while in Montana, the two tribes had been living on various city dumps in Montana. Some ten thousand acres of Beaver Creek drainage was given to the people of Havre for a park. Beaver Creek Park is still in use today.
Most of the balance of the lands was opened to homesteading and some stayed as federal lands to this day.
What to do with the buildings at the Fort was a huge question. It was decided by the Legislature to accept the buildings from the Federal Government and to turn them into a large college with a huge campus. In conjunction to the school, it was hoped that an Agricultural Experiment Station could be developed there as well.
My father said that when he was a young boy in Havre, he and his brothers and sister would ride out to Fort Assinniboine and play there for an afternoon. He went on to say that the parade ground was just a mass of papers, books and maps and in the operating room of the hospital, there were still the surgeon's tools left as if everyone had packed up and left in the night,
Enter, Guy Vandebogart, the first president of Northern Montana College. He was hired to build a school out of Fort Assinniboine.
Yet, there was a large group of Havre citizens who wanted the school to be in town, not seven miles southwest of town.
To entice Vandebogart to build his school in town, the City of Havre gave the school an old pumping station and the grounds around it. That was the start of the Havre Campus. The old pumping station became East Hall, a music building and building for offices. Then the Presbyterian Church offered their whole basement for a college library and all of a sudden the school was being built in Havre, not south west at all.
Meanwhile an experiment station run by Montana State College at Bozeman was being built out of the remains of Fort Assinniboine. Large contracts were given for tearing down buildings that were not going to be used any more. Most of the bricks and water pipes and things suitable to build housing, was used for houses and apartments in Havre. The Woodrow Apartments were built from brick etc from the old Fort. The Assinniboine Apartments where the Havre Post Office is today were built from Fort Assinniboine materials. In the far west end of Tenth Street, several of the houses there were built from Fort Assinniboine materials as well.
And there was Guy Vandebogart who, remember, thought he was the commander of what happened at Fort Assinniboine. It was not unusual for him to take water pipe and the like that was being used by the Experiment Station into town to use in building Northern. It was not unusual for a woman to go to do her Monday wash and find she had no water and no water pipes in her basement at the Fort.
Pershing Hall was built using all materials from Fort Assinniboine.
So, all these days later, a few buildings still stand at Fort Assinniboine and grand tours are given of the onbuildings in the summer. Northern got built, Vande Bogart got fired but most think that without him, Northern Montana College would never have been built.
No papers fly around the parade ground anymore but the memories of those strange times remain and will always remain in North Central Montana.
