Contact Travel Montana at visitmt.com or call at 800-VISITMT for details about exploring the state, including its many historic sites. Specifics on the Lewis and Clark Trail can be found at www.lewisandclark.state.mt.us/ .

Historic Fort Benton, at river-mile zero of the 149-mile Wild and Scenic Upper Missouri River holds pride of place as “Montana’s Birthplace.” From June to September the tiny town also serves as the staging area for many Missouri Breaks trips and as home base for a slew of outfitters. Most river travelers arrive directly from the Great Falls airport, an hour’s drive away. But if time allows, a stop at Great Falls’s Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail Interpretive Center, in a spectacular riverside setting, offers a worthwhile overview of the expedition (406-727-8733; www.fs.fed.us/rl/lewisclark/lcic.htm ).

A list of approved river outfitters and shuttle operations is available from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which also provides detailed maps and other information about the river ( www.mt.blm.gov ; year-round, in Lewistown, Montana, 406-538-7461). For our trip through the Badlands, the Adventure Bound Canoe & Shuttle Company offered the flexibility we needed (877-538-4890; www.montanarivertrip.com ). A year earlier the Missouri River Canoe Company, which also operates an antiques-filled bed-and-breakfast in nearby Virgelle, had started us on our way to the White Cliffs (800-426-2926; www.canoemontana.com .) Missouri River Outfitters is a long-established Fort Benton company specializing in multiday outings on pontoon boats (406-622-3295; www.mroutfitters.com ).

Fort Benton enjoys a lengthy history. From its founding in 1846 through the turn of the twentieth century, the town was the hub of trade and travel for the northern Great Plains and much of the American and Canadian West. “All trails lead out of Benton” was a nineteenth-century saying that spoke to the town’s importance for overland as well as river traffic, and until the railroad arrived in 1887, the town’s location at the Upper Missouri’s head of navigation made it “the Chicago of the Plains.”

Much diminished in all respects since those heady days, Fort Benton, population about 1,600, nevertheless retains a quiet charm. It entered the twenty-first century as Montana’s oldest continuously inhabited white settlement, with National Historic Landmark status. The town’s streets and buildings give shape and form to eras that once defined life on the Upper Missouri.

Along the parklike steamboat levee, most visitors stop for a look at the bronze state memorial to Lewis and Clark. But hardly anyone notices, just a stone’s throw down the bank, the palletlike planking resting in shallow water. It’s all that’s left here of the Baby Rose —or of any of the steamboats that disgorged freight and humanity onto rough-and-ready Front Street, for years among the West’s most violent blocks. (Nowadays a dog could nap peacefully by the BLM’s seasonal Visitor Center at 1718 Front Street (406-622-5185.) Meanwhile, across Front