Vicinity of Fort Berthold and Like-A-Fishook Village

Documentary Photo, About 1953
North Dakota Heritage Center

Fort Berthold was not a military fort but a fur trading post first called Fort James, which was established here in 1845 by James Kipp. It was acquired in 1846 by the firm of Pierre Chouteau, Jr., and Company and renamed for one of the partners in the fur company. Several years later another post with the same name was built in that vicinity.

Also in 1845 the Mandans and Hidatsas, needing to move from their settlements around the mouth of the Knife River, where the wood supply had become depleted, established a new village some fifty miles upriver near Fort Berthold, naming it "Like-A-Fishook."

Born in Italy in 1781, Berthelemi Antoine Mathias Bertolla de Mocenigo (whose brother, in Venice, manufactured glass beads for the fur trade) emigrated to America in 1798 and changed his name to Bartholomew Berthold. He moved to Saint Louis in 1809 and soon became one of the city's most distinguished and successful merchants. In partnership with his wife's brother, Pierre Chouteau, Jr., and two of her cousins, he purchased the Western Department of John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company in 1834.

Sources
Roy Willard Meyer, The Village Indians of the Upper Missouri: The Mandans, Hidatsas, and Arikaras (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977), pp. 100-101.

Charles van Ravenswaay, Saint Louis: An Informal History of the City and its People, 1764-1865 (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 1991), 99-100.

--Joseph Mussulman