From 1869 to 1885, supplies and trade goods coming up the Missouri River from St. Louis were transferred at Fort Benton from steamboats to freight wagons for distribution in southern Alberta along the Whoop-Up Trail, which ran near here. In 1869, traders John Healy and Andrew Hamilton established the 200-mile route from Fort Benton to the junction of the Belly and St. Mary rivers in Canada, where they built Fort Whoop=Up. It became the first of a chain of "whiskey forts" where American traders exchanged tobacco, sugar, knives, beads, and rot-gut whiskey to the Blackfeet Indians for buffalo robes and wolf pelts. The trade was lucrative and made fortunes for the traders, to the detriment of the Blackfeet, who suffered the negative effects of the exchange. After complaints from both sides of the international border, the Canadian government sent the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to drive the whiskey traders back across the border into Montana in 1874. Soon afterward, Fort Benton merchants and traders found there was even more money in supplying Royal Canadian Mounted Police posts in Alberta. The arrival of the Canadian Pacific Railroad in the province in 1883 brought the trade to an end, and the Whoop-Up Trail soon fell into disuse. It later stood as a reverse precursor to Alberta-Montana rum-running channels during Prohibition in the United States.