Built in 1822 by the Columbia Fur Company to serve the expanding fur trade in the American West, the square fort served as an important rest stop and trading post for trappers and explorers such as Jim Bridger and Hugh Glass. In the early 1840s, as the American fur trade moved further west, Fort Kiowa was abandoned. It was eventually flooded by the Missouri River, and today the site of the building is submerged beneath the man-made reservoir of Lake Sharpe.