01Summary
Built by fur trader Nathaniel Wyeth in 1834, later a Hudson's Bay Company post. The last major resupply before the Snake River country.
02History
Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth built Fort Hall in 1834 on the Snake River near present-day Pocatello, Idaho. He sold it to the British Hudson's Bay Company in 1837. From then until the boundary settlement of 1846 it was a key HBC post, and an ambivalent one.
HBC clerks at Fort Hall actively tried to talk Oregon-bound emigrant trains into abandoning their wagons and continuing west on horseback. Their motive was partly practical (they doubted wagons could finish the trip) and partly commercial (they preferred American settlers stayed in California, away from HBC fur country). In 1843 Marcus Whitman led the Great Migration through anyway, and after that wagons continued west by default.
The Snake River flooded the post repeatedly. The last buildings were destroyed in the 1860s, and the U.S. Army built a separate post, also called Fort Hall, in 1870, about 25 miles north on the Shoshone-Bannock reservation.
03Today
The original Fort Hall site is on Shoshone-Bannock tribal land and is closed to the public. A full-scale replica built in the 1960s stands at Ross Park in Pocatello, run by the city.
04People connected here
05Stops nearby
The Oregon Trail ran roughly 2,170 miles from Independence, Missouri to Oregon City. The stops immediately before and after this one are linked below; show Fort Hall on the interactive map for the full route.