The Missouri River has long been the lifeblood of the plains, drawing American Indians for centuries to hunt game and gather plants, with ancient camps and bison kill sites showing human dependence on the river. As a route of western expansion, it had few equals: Lewis and Clark followed it westward in search of a route to the Pacific, passing here with the Corps of Discovery on May 24, 1805, during the second year of their journey and camping two and a half miles upriver, while expedition members sailed, poled, and mostly pulled their boats against the powerful current at an average of thirteen miles a day. After their expedition, fur traders worked upriver in cumbersome keelboats and helped open the area for settlement, and later steamboats carried miners, settlers, adventurers, and supplies that made settlement possible. Among the most prominent figures in this history was James Kipp of Montreal, born in 1788, a fur trader, fort builder, and steamboat captain who in 1831 established Fort Piegan one hundred twenty-eight river miles above here at the mouth of the Marias River, the first American Fur Company trading post on the Missouri west of Fort Union, and who returned the next spring with more than four thousand beaver pelts and many other furs before retiring in 1859 after forty-one years in the fur trade. Until 1860, travel west of Fort Union was difficult physical labor, with most travelers literally pulling boats upriver, but in that year the steamboat Chippewa reached Fort Benton and proved the treacherous Missouri navigable to that point. Over the next thirty years, tons of supplies and thousands of people traveled into central Montana by steamboat, and the boats returned downriver carrying frontier wealth in gold, pelts, buffalo robes, and eventually beef and wool. The river also posed a major barrier to north-south travel, and until the late 1950s ferries were the only way to cross between Fort Peck Dam and Fort Benton, until the Fred Robinson Bridge was dedicated in 1959, named for Malta state senator Fred Robinson, who served forty years and drove its construction. Today this stretch of the Upper Missouri remains a national treasure, extending upriver to Fort Benton as a National Wild and Scenic River and downriver to Fort Peck as the heart of the C.M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge.