For over two decades, from 1834 to 1856, fur trappers and Oregon Trail wagon trains passed by this adobe fort. Nathaniel Wyeth, an ambitious Bostonian, built the post in 1834 but soon sold his holdings to the Hudson's Bay Company, whose staff took over in 1838. British Fort Hall continued to welcome travelers even after it became United States territory in 1846. The site is now part of the Fort Hall Reservation and is administered by the Shoshone-Bannock Tribal Council. It was declared a National Historic Landmark on October 15, 1966. Osborne Russell wrote in 1834 that the fort was a stockade eighty feet square, built of cottonwood trees set on end, sunk two and a half feet in the ground, standing about fifteen feet high, with two bastions eight feet square at opposite angles, and that on August 5 the Stars and Stripes were raised at sunrise over an American trading post. Theodore Talbot wrote in September 1843 that Fort Hall was a small and rather ill-constructed fort built of adobe near the entrance of the Portneuf into the Snake River, where the river bottoms were wide, some land was fertile though much was harmed by salt deposits from neighboring hills, wheat and turnips had grown successfully, and cattle thrived well.