Scots-born Canadian Kenneth McKenzie (aka Kenneth MacKenzie)…

Scots-born Canadian Kenneth McKenzie (aka Kenneth MacKenzie) is nicknamed the “King of the Missouri”, for as a fur trader for American Fur Company in the upper Missouri River valley, he controls a territory larger than most European nations.

John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company had spent years negotiating, and finally met McKenzie's demands in 1827 to buy Columbia Fur.

It is renamed the "Upper Missouri Outfit" division of American Fur, and in 1828, McKenzie travels upriver to lead the fur trade, building Fort Union, perhaps first known as Fort Henry, in 1828 or 1829 near the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers and the present North Dakota/Montana border.

Fort Union is ideally situated to dominate the final years of the beaver pelt trade and the beginning of the buffalo hide trade, and many tribes deal with McKenzie.

Fort Union Trading Post is to remain the most important fur trading post on the upper Missouri until 1867.

Here, where two cultures find common ground and mutual benefit through commercial exchange and cultural acceptance, the Assiniboine, Crow, Cree, Ojibway, Blackfeet, Hidatsa, and other tribes trade buffalo robes and furs for trade goods such as beads, guns, blankets, knives, cookware, cloth, and especially alcohol.