The Lewis and Clark Expedition passed by here on its westward journey in May 1805, and fur trappers and traders followed a few years later. In the early 1860s, steamboats began traveling from St. Louis up the Missouri as far as Fort Benton, and Wolf Point became the halfway point between Bismarck and Fort Benton, with wood choppers supplying cord wood for boats stopping to refuel. In 1861, the American Fur Company packet Chippewa blew up and sank not far from here after a deck hand tapped a barrel of alcohol by candle light and the fumes, the candle, and 25 kegs of black powder caused an explosion, though no lives were lost. Wolf Point originated as a sub-agency and trading post for the Fort Peck Reservation in 1879. Its name came from a winter when trappers killed several hundred wolves and stacked their frozen carcasses next to the river, where men heading upriver on a steamboat saw them, and the name remained.