The Long, Gentle Thrum of the Fisk Expeditions

Minnesota to Montana, 1862–1866

There are journeys that live only as ink on a ledger and there are journeys that become something like a song — a steady, repeating cadence that communities hum for years after the wagons are gone. The Fisk expeditions belong to that second sort: not merely records in dispatches and printed reports, but a set of pilgrimages across the northern plains that braided Minnesota fields to Montana valleys and left, in their wake, photographs, sod walls, graves, and small, stubborn newspapers. 

Captain James Liberty Fisk was not a saint of the frontier. He was, by many accounts, a hustler and a dreamer — a Civil War quartermaster turned superintendent of emigration whose gift was publicity as much as logistics. In the years between 1862 and 1866 Fisk led four overland expeditions that came to be known, simply and insistently, as the Fisk expeditions. He sold hope like a ticket: safe passage to gold and new beginnings, a ribboned route across territory that was, in fact, contested and dangerous. 

The first of these journeys launched in 1862 from St. Paul and Fort Abercrombie, a compact and anxious column of men, women, children, wagons and oxen bound for the Montana gold fields. Fisk had been authorized by the War Department to open a northern emigrant route; his early parties were modest but earnest, often accompanied by guides who knew the river bends and the sandhills. Those first treks read like the beginning of a novel: prairie days strung with river crossings, evenings around small fires, and the slow, unavoidable accumulation of stories that would later fill county histories. 

By 1863 Fisk was already a familiar name on the plains, and the expeditions took on the atmosphere of a movement. He carried with him not only wagons but also ambition: one small tale from that year tells of gold nuggets Fisk intended to present to President Lincoln, an almost theatrical gesture that somehow captured the character of the man and the age — showmanship stitched to convulsive national expansion. 

Not every stretch of that route was a pastoral dream. The autumn of 1864 brought the most harrowing episode in Fisk’s chronicle: the siege that produced Fort Dilts. As Fisk’s party skirted the badlands in hopes of saving distance and time, it ran headlong into a larger reality — starving and enraged Hunkpapa Sioux warriors, some led by Sitting Bull, who had seen their hunting grounds and food supplies devastated by campaigns in the region. The emigrants circled wagons and heaped sod into walls, naming the refuge Fort Dilts after a soldier who fell in the fighting. For several days the little ring of earth and timber held; when relief finally came the place remained, and remains still, a marker of a collision between two very different futures. 

Fort Dilts is more than an episode in a file; it is a landscape you can visit, a ring in the grass where archaeological trenching has shown the fort to be essentially undisturbed. The sod walls, the ruts of the wagons, the small graves — these are physical echoes of the fear and courage of that September. To stand there now, with the wind sliding low across the plains, is to listen for the muffled clatter of the past. 

If Fort Dilts is the dark, intimate stanza of the Fisk tale, then 1866 was its great, brassy chorus. Fisk’s fourth and largest expedition left Minnesota with a scale that seemed almost Victorian in its appetite: hundreds of people, more than one hundred wagons, and an entourage of hopeful advertisements promising military protection and the glitter of gold. It was on this trip that William H. Illingworth — a photographer from St. Paul with a portable darkroom and a keen eye — rode along and made images that have endured as some of the clearest windows we have into that passing world. Illingworth’s stereographs record long lines of canvas, cigarette-smoke horizons, and faces turned toward some future shuttered from the present. 

Those photographs are more than curiosities. They are the small miracles of chemistry and patience that allow us, in the modern light of a screen, to look back and see how the prairie held its people. The Montana Historical Society and other archives preserve Illingworth’s images, and auction houses and private collections occasionally bring them out as postcards from a distant country. They show camps at St. Cloud and Fort Union, wagon trains crossing tablelands, men and horses and the indefinite horizon — the stage on which dreams and missteps were played. 

The outcomes of those trips were mixed. Some parties found gold or the beginnings of a life in Helena and other mining towns; other travelers turned back, broke or disillusioned. The Fisk family itself stayed: James and his brothers settled in Montana and helped build the civic and commercial life of the young territory — newspapers, militias, and county affairs. The path that the Fisk caravans pressed into the prairie would, in time, be one of many threads that stitched the northern plains into the map of the United States. 

What is astonishing when you read the reports and the journals is how ordinary the extraordinary appears: disputes over pay and procurement, the squabbles over leadership and credit, the small human dramas of a long road. Fisk himself was often criticized by military superiors for his disregard of orders and for financial sloppiness, yet he remained a charismatic and effective promoter of western emigration. He was, in short, the kind of man who prospered in an America that rewarded bigness of plan if not always propriety of method. 

More than the political or financial ledger, however, the Fisk expeditions survive in the way communities remember them. Town histories in Minnesota and Montana, state historical markers, and scholarship — from the careful archival work of the Minnesota Historical Society to analyses in journals and state historical bulletins — have kept the memory of those wagons alive. Scholars have argued that Fisk’s “Northern Route” became one of several arteries that carried settlers, traders, and ideas across the continent; it is also a reminder that “opening the West” had a human cost felt most severely by indigenous peoples. 

There is a tenderness to this story if you look for it: the way letters home folded with prairie dust, the polite cruelty of an advertisement that turned grim realities into prospects, the bark of a campfire conversation as a child fell asleep within earshot of coyotes. The romance, of course, is partly our own — a nostalgia for courage in its messy, unvarnished forms. Yet through the preserved words and photos we can touch what those people felt: a mixture of hunger, hope, fatigue and a stubborn intimacy with the land. 

Walking through the records — the roll of the 1866 company, the printed reports to the War Department, the stereographs that still catch the light — you realize how close memory and myth often are. Historians such as those who have written about the Fisk expeditions ask us to balance admiration for daring with a careful accounting of consequences. The expeditions made a road and a story; the road changed lives, and the story, in its fragments, continues to call to us. 

If you ever find yourself on the northern plains in late afternoon, take a slow moment to imagine that long, patient drum of wheels on grass and hard-packed earth. Think of Illingworth crouched beside his tripod catching the light; of the sod walls of Fort Dilts; of a small town paper in Helena that printed the next morning’s news. The Fisk expeditions, in the end, were not about glory so much as about the simple, stubborn human business of moving forward — of people who packed their lives into wagons and set off to remake the world a little. That remaking was both beautiful and terrible, romantic and real. For those who study the past, and for those who dream, the echoes are still there to listen to. 

Selected sources and archival pointers

James L. Fisk — Wikipedia. 

“Fisk Expeditions (1862–1866)” — Encyclopedia.com. 

Helen McCann White, Captain Fisk Goes to Washington, Minnesota History (PDF). 

Fort Dilts State Historic Site — North Dakota State Historical Society. history.nd.gov

National Register of Historic Places nomination, Fort Dilts. npgallery.nps.gov

William H. Illingworth — Wikipedia; and archives/auction records of his 1866 Fisk stereographs. 

JSTOR: “The Fisk Expeditions to the Montana Gold Fields.” 

Fisk Family papers (1858–1901), Archives West. archiveswest.orbiscascade.org

Montana Memory Project — Illingworth images and Fisk expedition stereographs.