The historic town of Rocky Point was on the south side of the Missouri River in Fergus County, Montana, in the Missouri Breaks. Rocky Point was located at a natural ford on the Missouri River.
In prehistoric times, American bison trailed down through the breaks to Rocky Point to cross the river. During the Missouri River steamboat era (1860s to 1880s), the buffalo trail system leading to and from the ford caused Rocky Point to become a steamboat landing, which received freight for mining camps in the Judith Mountains (to the south) and in the Little Rocky Mountains (to the north) and also for Fort Maginnis built in 1880. In the 1870s and 1880s, Rocky Point had a store, hotel, two saloons, a feed stable, a blacksmith shop and a ferry. Due to its remote location in the Missouri Breaks, in the 1870s and 1880s Rocky Point became a refuge for outlaws who turned to rustling cattle and horses until rancher-vigilantes took punitive action in 1884.
From 1886 to 1936 it had a post office nearby which was known as Wilder, and so the community of Rocky Point was sometimes also called Wilder. The community at the Rocky Point ford continued through the homesteading years from 1900 to 1918, but faded away when the ferry ceased to function in the 1920s, and it finally disappeared in 1936 when the Army Corps of Engineers condemned and bought up land adjacent to the Missouri River that might possibly be affected by Fort Peck Dam, then being built.
Today some historic but deteriorating structures still remain on the site, which is now on the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge operated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Being on public lands, the Rocky Point ford area may be approached by "dirt" roads and visited, but the roads become impassable when wet.
Before 1900 – steamboat landing, wood hawk yard, Missouri River crossing point and ferry
Prehistoric crossing point on the Missouri
At Rocky Point the Missouri River flows over a Bearpaw shale reef. This provided a rocky bottom and a low-water ford. This geologic feature made Rocky Point a crossing point on the Missouri for migrating bison since prehistoric times. The migrating herds established trails from the broad grassy plains on the north and south of the river, down through the breaks to the site of Rocky Point.
Steamboat landing – 1860s to the 1880s
With the discovery of gold in the Montana Territory in the early 1860s, the Missouri River became the main thoroughfare by which passengers and freight, particularly bulky freight, was moved by steamboats between the gold fields in the territory and the "states". In Montana the river ran through the Missouri Breaks for hundreds of miles. The breaks are steeply eroded badlands that severely limit access to the Missouri River. Rocky Point naturally became a steamboat landing because of its system of prehistoric buffalo trail system that led from the ford up through the breaks to the plains that lay north and south of the river.
The steamboat era lasted from the mid-1860s until the coming of the railroad in the mid to late 1880s. After 1874, when the Northern Pacific Railroad reached Bismarck, the riverboats usually brought freight from that river port to the terminus port at Fort Benton. Rocky Point's steamboat landing received and sent only the freight and passengers generated by local demand in the surrounding sparsely settled area. Steamboats had to get up to Ft. Benton on the spring rise in the Missouri River flow, caused by the outflow of snowmelt from the mountains. High water was in June, after which the level in the river fell. During low-water periods many larger boats bound for Fort Benton were forced to unload at points lower down on the river. These unloaded cargoes were either freighted overland, picked up by smaller boats or stored until the next high-water season. Some of this interrupted freight traffic during low water seasons on the Missouri brought business to the Rocky Point landing, but in low water the steamboats attempted to reach Cow Island landing, further up the river, because from Cow Island there was a better freight route up Cow Creek to Fort Benton.
Gold discoveries in the Judith Mountains, at Maiden, and in the Little Rocky Mountains increased interest in Rocky Point as a landing point for the mill machinery coming by boat. The mines in the Judith Mountains, to the southwest of Rocky Point, were discovered in 1880. The gold strikes in the Little Rockies (a small outlier mountain range on the eastern Montana plains) was first made as a placer gold strike in 1884, but this placer strike only lasted a few years.