Chapter Four

 

 

Chapter Four – Lewis and Clark Senior Style

Bismarck – Fort Mandan - Hidatsa Villages

 

Lewis and Clark’s destination for the first leg of their cross country expedition was the Mandan Villages, where they intended to stay the winter of 1804-1805.  Our destination on July 4^th was Bismarck, North Dakota, forty miles south of the 19^th century Mandan Villages.    The drive up from Pierre was beautiful as the flat farm lands of South Dakota transformed slowly into the rolling hills of North Dakota.  Both states had experienced nourishing spring rains and the fields and grasslands were a lush, healthy green.  As we passed through the sporadic small towns, there would be no grocery store or motel, but we would see towering grain silos and John Deere dealerships with rows of huge new farm equipment neatly parked and ready for purchase.  In productive years, farmers buy new equipment, and clearly, by the look of the farms this was a good year for Dakota farmers and a good year for John Deere dealerships.

South Dakota Farmland

We made two stops between the Dakota capitals.  The first was Sitting Bull’s grave site, a modest memorial in the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota; and the second was the archeological site of a 500 year old Indian village called the Huff Village, which had its last archeological dig in 1999.  We walked from the car and wondered across a grass covered field of rolling mounds dotted with signs explaining the village life that had once existed there.  The ancient tribe had engaged in farming and lived in a crowded village.  Their dome shaped houses had been made of wood covered in sod and were surrounded by a deep ditch on three sides with the river on the fourth to protect them from enemies.  The once vibrant village was now an isolated spot off the highway adjacent to a camp ground occupied by one trailer. 

We arrived at our Bismarck hotel near dinner time and after two weeks of living out of the car, we had become professionals at knowing which bags to take into the hotel and which to leave in the car.  We loaded a limited number of bags onto a hotel cart, hauled them up to our room in the elevator and stacked them neatly in a row where we could easily find anything we needed.  Hey, we are pros at this Grapes of Wrath lifestyle.  Bismarck, larger than Pierre, had every chain restaurant and hotel imaginable.  We ate at Red Lobster (of course I had grilled walleye), and we decided to go to a movie.  We did not want to be intellectually challenged so we chose to see White House Down, a totally ridiculous action film that we enjoyed immensely.  (Even Seniors have moments when they want to experience the thrills of a movie made for twelve year olds.)  As we lay in bed that night, I heard rumbling above our heads.  I asked Russ how there could be noise above us when we were on the 3^rd floor.  He said, “that’s fireworks”.  His tone, not words, added “moron” to the end of his sentence, and I realized I had forgotten it was the 4^th of July. 

Fort Mandan

After breakfast the next morning we drove forty miles north of Bismarck to the small town of Washburn, the home of another Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center.  We were excited to visit the center because it had a replica of Fort Mandan, the name Lewis and Clark gave their 1804-1805 winter quarters.  In late October the Corps arrived at the Mandan villages, a series of densely populated communities housing nearly 5000 Mandan Indians.  The chief of the nearest village, visited the fort while it was under construction.  He told the captains that he was honored they had chosen to build their fort so near his village.  He promised Lewis and Clark that if his people had food the coming winter, Lewis and Clark and their men would eat, if his tribe starved Lewis and Clark must starve as well.  It was a terrible winter that year as temperatures dropped frequently to 40 degrees below zero.  The Mandan chief kept his promise and helped the Corps survive the excessively cold winter.

When Russ and I walked through the Fort Mandan replica, we were the only ones visiting it and we were able to take several unobstructed pictures.  The structure was surprisingly small to house forty-four people over a bitter five month winter.  It consisted of a courtyard lined on three sides by a series of small rooms and was surrounded by an outer wall of cut logs as protection against hostile

 Fort Mandan Exterior

tribes.  (The entire corps was very worried about the possibility of the Teton Sioux coming up the river to attack them, which undoubtedly added tension to their physical discomfort.)  The fort contained storage rooms for supplies, sleeping quarters for the enlisted men, sleeping quarters for the interpreters and their wives (including Sacagawea, who had her baby in the fort), guard quarters and a blacksmith shop.  The black smith shop was of utmost importance.  Indians living in the nearby villages had acquired metal tools through trade, but had no way of repairing them.  The three blacksmiths of the Corps spent the winter repairing the Indians’ tools in exchange for food.

Lewis and Clark spent their winter catching up on administrative work.   Jefferson had instructed the captains to send him information from the exploration as soon as they could.  Lewis spent the winter perfecting his plant specimen and animal descriptions.  Clark spent his time putting the final touches on the maps he had drawn of their journey.  Both had to copy their journals.  Below I am standing in the replica of their shared room.

Lewis' Desk in Captain's Room in Mandan Fort

 

Lewis and Clark had always planned to send the keel boat back to St. Louis in the spring, as they knew the boat would be too large to sail further up the Missouri.  In St. Louis they had hired French ‘voyagers’, familiar with the first portion of the journey, with the understanding that the ‘voyagers’ would return to St. Louis in the spring on the keel boat.  Lewis and Clark worked endless hours over the winter to prepare the materials they would send back to President Jefferson.

Knife River Indian Villages

After leaving the Fort Mandan replica, we drove an additional twenty-five miles to the Knife River Indian Villages, run by the U.S. Park Service.  In the 18^th and 19^th centuries the Hidatsa Indians lived in the villages, and it was here that Lewis hired Charbonneau, husband of Sacagawea.  The Hidatsa had a similar culture to the nearby Mandan Indians which enabled them to live peacefully alongside each other for many generations.  Both the Mandan and Hidatsa Villages were centers of active trading between Indians further West and the English and French traders.  The first thing we did when we stopped at the Visitor Center was watch a movie depicting the oral history of a Hidatsa woman born in 1840.  She described in detail the farming techniques practiced by village women and hunting and fighting skills performed by the men.  It was an outstanding film as her narrative and descriptions were fascinating and eye opening.  Following the film we went outside to view a replica of a typical Hidatsa home. 

Hidatsa Mound Home

Everything in the interior had a prescribed place and use, which the Mandan Indian woman explained in her narrative.   The houses varied in size accommodating an extended family of ten to thirty people.  They were built close together, originally for protection-later out of habit.  The replica house we visited smelled musky, but probably better than Indian times, when the horses were brought into the house at night.  The horses were hobbled next to the door, but still, they were sleeping with a horse in the house.

Hidatsa Mound Home Interiors

The tragic story of the Mandan Villages was that in 1837, thirty years after Lewis and Clark’s departure, a passenger became ill with small pox on a steamboat that landed at a town near to the villages, and the Mandans were exposed to the decease.  Everything about the Indians life style favored the spread of small pox and within a few weeks thousands of the Mandans died.  The one hundred Mandan survivors of small pox joined the Hidatsa’s, who had lost about 50% of their population to the same epidemic.  Overnight the Mandan culture and trading center was annihilated.   

After leaving the Hidatsa village site Russ and I drove back to Bismarck and prepared to leave the next day for Medora in the Southwest corner of North Dakota.  It was a diversion we had planned because current roads do not follow the Missouri and most of the river has been dammed along the old Lewis and Clark trail.  Besides we were getting a little tired of following Lewis and Clark and wanted to play golf.