A German Prince on the Missouri:

The Maximilian-Bodmer Expedition and Its Enduring Record of Montana's Fur Trade World

Section One: A Naturalist in Motion

In the summer of 1832, Prince Alexander Philipp Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied arrived in the United States with the deliberate purpose of a scientist, not the sentimentality of a tourist. Born in 1782 into a small German principality northeast of the Rhine, Maximilian had already distinguished himself as a naturalist of serious credentials. Between 1815 and 1817 he had conducted a sustained scientific expedition to southeastern Brazil, recording the flora, fauna, and indigenous peoples of the Atlantic forest interior with a rigor that earned him standing in European scholarly circles. He had studied under Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, one of the founders of physical anthropology, and approached human populations with the same empirical method he applied to plant specimens and bird skins. By 1832, he was fifty years old and restless for another field investigation. North America, specifically its vast interior river systems and their Native inhabitants, presented an irresistible subject.

Maximilian arrived in Boston on July 4, 1832, accompanied by two men who would prove essential to the expedition's success: Karl Bodmer, a twenty-three-year-old Swiss artist whom the prince hired specifically to produce a visual record of the journey, and David Dreidoppel, Maximilian's personal servant and a skilled hunter and taxidermist. The party toured the eastern United States through the remainder of 1832, but illness severely disrupted their progress. While traveling through Ohio, Maximilian fell dangerously ill with a cholera-like sickness that left him bedridden in Canton for three weeks. After recovering sufficiently to travel, he and Dreidoppel spent the winter in New Harmony, Indiana, utilizing the town's exceptional scientific library. Bodmer used this winter interval productively, traveling downriver to New Orleans to sketch the lower Mississippi country. By the spring of 1833, the party reunited in St. Louis, recovered and prepared to begin the western journey that would define the expedition's historical significance.

Section Two: Up the Missouri by Steam and Keelboat

In April 1833, Maximilian's party boarded the American Fur Company steamboat Assiniboine at St. Louis and began what would become a journey of roughly 2,500 river miles. Traveling upriver, the party transferred at Fort Pierre, in present-day South Dakota, to a second American Fur Company vessel, the steamboat Yellow Stone. The Yellow Stonewas itself a landmark technological achievement: built in Louisville, Kentucky, it had made the first successful steamboat run to Fort Union at the mouth of the Yellowstone River the previous year, in 1832, with the artist George Catlin among its passengers. Hiram Martin Chittenden, writing in his exhaustive History of Early Steamboat Navigation on the Missouri River, noted that the 1833 voyage was "particularly noteworthy as the one on which Prince Maximilian of Wied made his celebrated visit to the upper Missouri — a visit which has done more than any other one thing to preserve a true picture of those early times."

The Yellow Stone carried the party north to Fort Union, situated near the present-day Montana-North Dakota border. Fort Union was the hub of the American Fur Company's upper Missouri trade, a post of considerable scale and commercial activity. From Fort Union, the party transferred to a human-powered keelboat named the Flora—a craft requiring a dedicated crew to pull it upstream against the punishing current. Their westernmost destination was Fort McKenzie, built in what is today north-central Montana, a few miles above the confluence of the Missouri and Marias rivers, near present-day Fort Benton.

Throughout this journey, the Missouri River itself was a presence that demanded description. Maximilian observed and recorded the landscape continuously — the geological formations along the upper river, the character of the soil, the species of birds and mammals encountered along the banks. He noted in July 1833 that the prairie was "dry and yellow" and that "the least motion, even of a wolf crossing it, raised the dust." These were not literary flourishes but field observations, produced by a man trained to record what he saw with precision. Bodmer, meanwhile, worked in watercolor and pencil at every opportunity, producing images of river formations, Indian encampments, individual portraits, and the machinery of the fur trade itself — the forts, the boats, the daily routines of men living at the edge of American commercial expansion.

Section Three: Fort McKenzie and the Blackfoot Confederacy

The party arrived at Fort McKenzie aboard the keelboat Flora on August 9, 1833. The post was a relatively new construction, erected by the American Fur Company after the Blackfoot Confederacy opened the upper Missouri country to American trade in 1831. The fort served as the principal trading station for the Siksika, Kainai, and Piegan divisions of the Blackfoot — three culturally related but politically distinct nations whom Maximilian and Bodmer now encountered for the first time. Upon arrival, Maximilian noted that the most prominent Piegan leader present was Mehkskeme-Sukahs, whom he described as the most distinguished of several chiefs who had come to greet the keelboat. The chief wore a lace-trimmed scarlet uniform obtained in trade from British sources, and two days later posed for Bodmer in a hide shirt decorated with otter fur and metal trade buttons.

Fort McKenzie was a post that traded in tension as readily as it traded in furs. The Blackfoot were in a near-constant state of armed conflict with neighboring nations — the Assiniboine, the Cree, the Crow — and the American traders were compelled to navigate these hostilities carefully, maintaining access to Blackfoot trade while trying not to alienate potential customers from competing groups. The atmosphere, as Maximilian recorded it, was never entirely stable. On August 28, 1833, that instability erupted violently.

In the early morning hours, a combined force of Assiniboine and Cree warriors struck an encampment of Piegan traders outside the fort's walls. The expedition's timeline records the attacking force at approximately 580, while an earlier account suggests it was estimated at around 6,000, a figure that likely reflects the frantic, excited perception of those inside the walls rather than an accurate count. The attack came with sufficient speed that several Piegan were killed before the fort's gates could be opened to admit survivors. Fort superintendent David Mitchell eventually led a counterattack that drove the attackers back south toward the Highwood Mountains.

Maximilian himself was not a passive observer. Accounts drawn from his journal indicate he took up position at a porthole and participated in the fort's defense, loading his weapon and preparing to fire. Bodmer, whose studio space at the fort had been a makeshift reception room where he conducted portrait sessions, witnessed the entire episode and later incorporated scenes from the Blackfoot encampment outside the fort into his published plates. The encounter appears in Tableau 43 of the eventual atlas, showing the camp scene that had, within days, become the site of a battle.

The violence persuaded Maximilian that further westward travel — he had intended to press toward the Rocky Mountain Front — was not practicable for a small party. Threats from multiple indigenous nations made the country dangerous. After five weeks at Fort McKenzie, the expedition turned back downriver.

Section Four: The Winter at Fort Clark

The party returned to Fort Union by late September and spent time there before descending to Fort Clark, on the Missouri in what is today North Dakota. It was here, among the Mandan and Hidatsa villages, that Maximilian conducted what would prove to be the most intensive and, in retrospect, most consequential portion of his scientific work. The winter of 1833 to 1834 was severe. The party endured conditions of considerable hardship, but Maximilian used the months productively, compiling detailed linguistic vocabularies of multiple plains tribes — including the Mandan, Hidatsa, Assiniboine, Blackfoot, Crow, Cheyenne, and Arikara — and recording the material culture, ceremonial practices, and social organization of the Mandan with a precision that no prior observer had achieved. Bodmer's work at Fort Clark likewise reached its greatest depth. His watercolor of the interior of a Mandan earth lodge, sketched over multiple months during winter residence, is among the finest ethnographic illustrations produced in nineteenth-century North America.

The spring of 1834 brought an end to their field investigations. The party departed Fort Clark and traveled downriver to St. Louis, arriving on May 27. Maximilian and Bodmer returned to Europe, reaching Le Havre in August 1834, having been away from Germany for more than two years.

Tragically, the fragile fruits of this intensive labor were highly vulnerable to the perils of 19th-century transit. Though Maximilian successfully returned with his journals, the bulk of his irreplaceable natural history collection—including botanical specimens, taxidermy, living animals, and cultural artifacts left behind to be shipped home later—was completely destroyed in the summer of 1835 when the American Fur Company steamboat Assiniboine caught fire and sank near the mouth of the Heart River. Maximilian recorded his profound frustration at these setbacks, which devastated the biological side of his research goals.

Section Five: Publication and Its Meaning

Over the five years following his return, Maximilian prepared his remaining observations for publication. The work appeared in German as Reise in das innere Nord-America in den Jahren 1832 bis 1834, published in two volumes at Coblenz between 1839 and 1841. An English translation by H. Evans Lloyd appeared with Ackermann and Company in London between 1839 and 1843, accompanied by an atlas of eighty-one hand-colored aquatint plates derived from Bodmer's watercolors. A French edition followed. The publication was a major event in the literature of western North America, combining a trained naturalist's observation with an artist's visual record of a quality that had not previously been achieved for the upper Missouri country.

The timing of publication coincided with a catastrophe that rendered Maximilian's work irreplaceable. In 1837 and 1838, a smallpox epidemic swept through the tribes of the upper Missouri with devastating effect. The Mandan were reduced from a thriving agricultural nation to a remnant population of perhaps a few dozen individuals. The Hidatsa and Arikara suffered comparable losses. The Blackfoot were struck hard as well, losing more than half their numbers in some estimates. As the preface to one early edition of Maximilian's Travels observed, his observations were "carefully recorded and scientifically collated by a trained observer and scholar" and formed "a contribution to American philology now impossible to duplicate," precisely because "five years after Maximilian's visit to the upper river, smallpox broke out among the tribes, and carried its ravages to such an extent that bands once powerful were reduced to scanty remnants." Bodmer's portraits, as the rare book trade has long recognized, became doubly valuable after the 1837 smallpox epidemic which killed vast numbers of the indigenous peoples of the plains.

This was not a consequence Maximilian anticipated. He was recording what he believed to be a living world, one that would continue to evolve and persist. What he produced, inadvertently, was a document of a world on the cusp of catastrophic transformation.

Section Six: The Montana Dimension

For students of Montana history specifically, the Maximilian-Bodmer expedition holds a particular importance. The expedition's time in what is today Montana — from Fort McKenzie downriver — represents the first sustained scientific observation of the upper Missouri landscape and its indigenous inhabitants since the Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery had passed through nearly three decades earlier. The National Historical Publications and Records Commission, which supported the scholarly edition of Maximilian's journals published by the University of Oklahoma Press, described the North American expedition as "the first scientific exploration of the Missouri River's upper reaches since the epic journey of Lewis and Clark almost thirty years earlier." Unlike Lewis and Clark, whose purposes were strategic and commercial as well as scientific, Maximilian's focus on the human populations of the river — their languages, ceremonial lives, trade practices, and material culture — produced a record of depth and specificity that remains a foundational source for ethnohistorians working on the Blackfoot Confederacy and their neighbors.

Bodmer's images of the upper Missouri landscape — the geological formations, the river bluffs, the fort structures — provide equally important visual documentation of a landscape that has since been substantially altered by navigation improvements, dam construction, and agricultural development. The Missouri Breaks country that Maximilian traversed remains one of the more intact stretches of the historic river, and his descriptions of it retain their utility for researchers working on landscape history.

The fort Maximilian described at McKenzie — a quadrangle roughly forty-five by forty-seven paces, by his own measurement — no longer exists. Fort McKenzie was abandoned and eventually burned after a particularly violent encounter between the American Fur Company staff and a Blackfoot group in 1844. The site near present-day Fort Benton has been identified and studied archaeologically, but Maximilian's written description and Bodmer's sketches of the structure remain among the most detailed contemporaneous accounts of it.

Section Seven: Legacy and Scholarly Assessment

The full scholarly edition of Maximilian's journals, produced by the Joslyn Art Museum's Maximilian Journals Project in partnership with the University of Oklahoma Press and published in three annotated volumes between 2008 and 2012, represents the culmination of more than fifty years of editorial work. The project was supported by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. The volumes restore Maximilian's observations — on topography, natural history, indigenous peoples, and the mechanics of the fur trade — in their full detail, with extensive annotation that cross-references his observations against subsequent scholarship. Marsha V. Gallagher, who also produced a concise edition of the journals, described the project as presenting what no prior edition had managed: the complete narrative of the expedition, from Boston to the upper Missouri and back, available to modern readers in a form adequate to the source's significance.

What the expedition produced, in sum, was not simply a travel account but a document of contact — between a disciplined European scientific tradition and a set of Native cultures whose transformation was already underway and whose more acute disruption was imminent. Maximilian approached the people he encountered with a sincere attempt to portray them not as stereotypes but as distinct individuals with complex acquired skills and traditions ideally suited for life in their environment. That framing was not without its own 19th-century European cultural assumptions, but it produced a body of observation far more rigorous and respectful than the sensationalist accounts that characterized much popular writing about the American West in the same period.

For Montana, the expedition's passage through the upper Missouri country in the summer of 1833 left behind something of enduring value: a record, in words and images, of a world that was, within a very few years, irrevocably altered. That record remains indispensable.

Works Cited

• Chittenden, Hiram Martin. History of Early Steamboat Navigation on the Missouri River: Life and Adventures of Joseph La Barge. Francis P. Harper, 1903. Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/64136/64136-h/64136-h.htm. Accessed 5 June 2026.

• Maximilian, Prince of Wied. Travels in the Interior of North America, 1832–1834. Translated by H. Evans Lloyd, Ackermann and Co., 1843. Library of Congress Digital Collections, https://www.loc.gov/item/06019696/. Accessed 5 June 2026.

• Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Karl Bodmer: North American Portraits, Exhibition Gallery." The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2021, https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2021/karl-bodmer-north-american-portraits/exhibition-gallery. Accessed 5 June 2026.

• National Historical Publications and Records Commission. "The North American Journals of Prince Maximilian of Wied, 1832–1834." National Archives and Records Administration, https://www.archives.gov/nhprc/projects/catalog/prince-maximilian-wied. Accessed 5 June 2026.

• Thomas, Davis, and Karin Ronnefeldt, eds. People of the First Man: Life Among the Plains Indians in Their Final Days of Glory. E. P. Dutton, 1976.

• Wied, Maximilian, Prince Alexander Philipp. The North American Journals of Prince Maximilian of Wied. Edited by Stephen S. Witte and Marsha V. Gallagher, 3 vols., University of Oklahoma Press, 2008–2012.

• Witte, Stephen S., and Marsha V. Gallagher, eds. Travels in North America, 1832–1834: A Concise Edition of the Journals of Prince Maximilian of Wied. University of Oklahoma Press, 2018.