Geology made Rocky Point inevitable. Here the Missouri flows over a Bearpaw shale reef that creates a firm, rocky bottom, a low-water ford where bison could cross safely. The migrating herds wore trails down from the grassy plains on both sides of the river, carving paths through the breaks that later served wagon trains and cattle drives. When steamboats began working the Missouri in the 1860s, Rocky Point became a natural landing. Freight bound for mining camps in the Judith Mountains and Little Rocky Mountains unloaded here, as did supplies for Fort Maginnis, built in 1880. By 1881, Rocky Point was the designated steamboat landing for the fort, handling passengers and cargo alike.

The steamboats ran on cottonwood. At remote camps along the Missouri, men called wood hawks harvested trees from riverside groves and stacked cordwood along the banks. Steamboats would stop, buy fuel, and continue upriver. Rocky Point hosted one of these wood hawk camps as early as 1868, when Lohmire and Lee set up operations on the flat south of the river. By the 1880s, the settlement had grown to include a store, hotel, two saloons, a feed stable, a blacksmith shop, and a ferry. Cowboy Teddy Blue Abbott later recalled the town's cast of characters, including a woman called Big Ox "who was one of those haybags that used to follow the buffalo camps."

The Missouri Breaks sprawl across hundreds of miles of badlands that in the 1870s straddled several territorial counties, far from any county seat. Law enforcement was nonexistent. If a sheriff from one county showed up, outlaws simply swam their horses across the river into another jurisdiction. Rocky Point became a gathering place for men who lived in the river bottoms and "masqueraded as buffalo hunters, Indian traders or wood hawks." Their real business was rustling horses and cattle from the ranches spreading across the prairie. They would steal stock on one side of the Missouri, drive it through the breaks, change the brands, cross at Rocky Point, and sell the animals on the other side. The system worked until 1884, when rancher-vigilantes took action. Red Mike and Brocky Gallagher swung from ropes, and rustling declined in the breaks.

As buffalo vanished from the Montana plains in the early 1880s, cattle replaced them, most trailed up from Texas. The ford at Rocky Point became a crossing point for massive herds. One rancher recorded driving drought-stressed cattle toward the river: "The wind was from the north and cattle smelled the water and broke for it. No power on earth could stop the poor thirsty beasts; bellowing and lowing they ran pell-mell for the water, with the cowboys in hot pursuit." Quicksand caught some animals above the ford. A steamboat at the landing used its donkey engine to drag out what cattle it could, but seventy head died that day, mired in Missouri mud.

The railroads killed Rocky Point slowly. The Northern Pacific completed its Montana line in 1883; the Great Northern built through in 1887. Steamboat traffic ceased. The ferry kept the town alive through the homesteading years of 1900 to 1918, operated by Elmer Turner from 1907 until 1927, when he dismantled it and used the lumber to repair buildings in town. The final blow came in 1936 when the Army Corps of Engineers condemned all land adjacent to the Missouri that might be affected by Fort Peck Dam, then under construction. Rocky Point vanished from the maps, though the dam's reservoir never reached this far. The deteriorating structures that remain now belong to the wildlife refuge, accessible only to those willing to risk the gumbo roads.