Visit Terry Montana

The Spanish at one time claimed the territory where modern day Terry, Montana is located but the only inhabitants were Native Americans, huge herds of buffalo and elk. The first white man to record his presence in the area was Sieur de la Verendrye from Canada who led an expedition into the area along the Yellowstone River in Montana. Verendrye wrote in his journal that he viewed the entire area from the top of Sheep Mountain in August 1742.

The entire state of Montana became available to the very young United States with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. The transaction between President Thomas Jefferson and Emperor Napoleon involved the sale of a vast expanse of half a continent. In 1806, the Corps of Discovery group led by William Rogers Clark traveled down the Yellowstone River on their way to rendezvous with Meriwether Lewis and his detachment at the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers. Near the mouth of the Powder River on the Yellowstone River, Clark and his party encountered dangerous river rapids. Near present day O’Fallon Creek, William Clark spotted a grizzly bear and described it as “a tremendous animal”.

Manuel Lisa and John Colter (a member of the Corps of Discovery) came up the Yellowstone River in 1807 leading a group of fur trappers. The Lisa expedition wintered at a fort they built at the mouth of the Bighorn River. That fort was abandoned after trouble with Blackfoot that kept fur trappers away for 30 years. The Terry country was mapped by the Warren Survey party in 1856 and then again by the Captain Raynolds expedition in 1859. There was an unfriendly encounter between members of the Raynolds expedition and a party of Crow near Sheep Mountain.

The Territory was officially established by an Act of Congress in 1864 and at the suggestion of James M. Ashley was named “Montana,” Latin for mountainous. Big Horn County was all the land in Montana Territory east of Gallatin County and Choteau County, from the Canadian border to Wyoming, and this was the largest county in the United States. In 1877, the name of the county was changed to Custer County and in 1915 Prairie County was formed from areas taken from Custer, Dawson and Fallon Counties.

In 1868, Jesuit Missionary Father DeSmet met with the Sioux leader Sitting Bull at the mouth of the Powder River where there was a camp of 500 to 600 tipis or teepees. The area where this large camp was, four or five miles up the Yellowstone River, is where numerous archaeological artifacts have been found. Troubles between the U.S. Army and the Sioux Nation were escalating during this time period. The U.S. Army marked a road from Fort Peck to Sheridan, Wyoming in 1870 but Sioux attacks halted the progress of the Northern Pacific Railroad survey in 1872. In 1873, General Stanley led a U.S. Army expedition of 1,900 men, 275 wagons and 2,316 horses and mules to the Powder River. The steamboats, Far West, Key West and Pariah, loaded with supplies from out of Fort Abraham Lincoln (near present day Mandan and Bismarck, North Dakota) accompanied this force. General George Armstrong Custer was a member of this expedition and there is a photograph of him taken with a large bear that Custer shot and killed at the Powder River.

North of where the Powder River and the Yellowstone River meet is a large butte that was named “Sheridan Butte” by General Sandy Forsyth (in General Phil Sheridan’s command) traveling on the Far West. The Far West was the first steamboat to travel up the Powder River on 13 May 1873. On 7 June 1876, General Terry and General Custer halted their troops at the Powder River (below the present day site of Locate, Montana) for an overnight encampment. They would soon divide their commands with Custer advancing overland to the Little Bighorn River and Terry continuing up the Yellowstone River on the Far West.

On 3 July 1876, the Far West was hurrying back to Fort Abraham Lincoln with wounded from the Little Bighorn Battlefield. U.S. Army Private William H. George, from Lexington, Kentucky, died aboard the steamboat and was buried at the Powder River. After the burial, the Far West continued down river with the news that Custer and his command of 277 U.S. 7th Cavalry troopers had been wiped out by the Sioux forces at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

U.S. Army soldiers returning to the Powder River encampment later in 1876 to recover supplies left there were surprised and attacked by Sioux warriors. A U.S. Army Scout named Brockmeyer was killed at this engagement and buried under a pile of rocks. That night army officers and the steamboat crew played poker for Brockmeyer’s personal property and in the morning Captain Marsh of the Far West had a roll of several hundred dollars in paper currency and this money along with Brockmeyer’s property was sent to Brockmeyer’s sister.

Until 1880, there were other fights between the U.S. Army and the Sioux in the Terry area resulting in casualties among the soldiers. A monument was placed at Private George’s grave by the Prairie County Bicentennial Committee in 1976.

In 1877, buffalo hunter J. W. Montague (believed to be the first settler of Terry, Montana) built a dugout about two miles south of the present day site of the town of Terry. Montague was originally from Pine Grove, Pennsylvania. He ran a wayside inn, and furnished food and lodging for groups of soldiers traveling through the Powder River area and sold hay to freighters operating between Dakota Territory and Miles City.
Later that year the steamboat, Osceola, was destroyed by a tornado at the mouth of the Powder River in what steamboat Captain Mark Fowler described as “a fearful storm”. Caught in the open, miles from shelter among timber, the tornado came upon the steamship like “an avenging fiend.”

The settlement of Joubert’s Landing was renamed Terry in 1880 after General Alfred H. Terry, overall commander of a six year campaign against the Sioux. Outlaws and robberies occurred in the area from time to time but Terry was growing. A Miles City merchant, Morris Cahn, was following behind a U.S. Army paymaster and troops but lagged too far behind and was robbed at gunpoint by Big Nose George in a coulee a few miles west of Terry (later named Cahn’s Coulee). A legend says that part of the loot is still buried in the coulee. After the robbery, Big Nose George went back to Miles City and bought new shoes for the city’s orphans. I guess George had a Big Heart too.

The Northern Pacific Railroad was running regularly to Glendive by 1881 and Terry was an overnight stop for travelers coming from Miles City and going to Glendive. Terry had a telegraph station in April 1881 and a post office in May and the Northern Pacific Railroad tracks reached Terry in October that year.

The train was on a daily schedule through Terry by 1882 and in 1883 former U.S. President Ulysses Simpson Grant traveled through Terry on the train on his way to Gold Creek, Montana to attend the Golden Spike ceremonies that officially recognized the Northern Pacific as a transcontinental railroad.

Terry, Montana is 182 miles east of Billings, Montana and can be reached on I-94 at Exit 176 and drive north on MT-253 into Terry.

Gregan Wortmann