Upper Missouri River Breaks by Bob Wick, Bureau of Land Management.
Fort Janeaux, Montana, also known as Janeaux’s Post, Fort Turnay, and Medicine Lodge, was established by Francis A. Janeaux, a licensed Metis Indian trader, later founded Lewistown, Montana.
He and his wife, Virginia Laverdure Janeaux, established a homestead in the fall of 1879 on Big Spring Creek, and in partnership with the trading firm of Leighton Brothers, Janeaux built a substantial post. The trading post, which measured about 100 by 150 feet, was surrounded by a stockade with two bastions at diagonal corners. Several log cabins stood in the middle: one for him and his family, and the others for clerks and interpreters. The post traded buffalo robes, furs, meat, and pemmican with traveling bands of Missouri River Indians and with about 100 families of the Red River Metis. No sooner had Janeaux established his trading post than he found himself in direct competition with Alfonzo S. Reed and his Reed’s Fort Settlement, just a half-mile away. In the end, Janeaux won out.
In 1882, he and his wife donated a 40-acre plot to develop the townsite of Lewistown, and the following year, he sold his store. By 1884, a two-story hotel stood across from the store, and soon livery stables and saloons surrounded his old trading post. Today, his post sits at the intersection of Third Avenue North and Broadway, right in the center of present-day Lewiston, Montana.
©Kathy Alexander/Legends of America, updated September 2026.
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