On a trip to Bismarck we traveled so we could visit the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center in Washburn, ND. President Thomas Jefferson commissioned Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to visit the recently purchased Louisiana territory along the Missouri River.
The journey of the Corp of Discovery would take them up the Missouri 1600 miles in 1804-06, and back again.
They spent their first winter north of Bismarck and named it Fort Mandan in honor of their native neighboring tribe. They carried metals of peace to be shared with the tribes they encountered.
One display was of a reconstruction of the "air gun" which used compressed air to fire at the velocity of a powdered rifle... this impressed the natives on their journey. Unfortunately it took about 1500 pumps and a half hour to fill the gun butt with compressed air.
One piece purportedly was found in the area on a "dig" and was a button off of an officer's coat, possibly from Clark's coat traded to the Indians.
Another piece seemed more likely to be an actual remnant of the Journey of Discovery. It was a hasp used to close one of the original journals on the trip. A man who borrowed the journals later treated them poorly including taking pieces of them and giving them to his friends.
There were some original pieces of art that I found fantastic many by Michael Haynes. This one is of an Indian Chief looking from the bluff above the Missouri down on the triangular "Fort Mandan" below.
William Clark often walked on shore as the boat worked its way upstream on the Missouri.
Meriwether Lewis took his Newfoundland Dog, Seaman, along on the trip and he is referred to several times in the journals.
Here is a picture of the northern lights.
We also visited the Knife River Indian villages across the river and north near Stanton, where there were 10,000 people living about the time there was the same population in New York. They were farmers living in earth lodges.
This re-creation shows the size of the interior where it has been demonstrated that with a fire burning inside it could keep the temperature at 65 degrees when it was 40 below outside.
This is a cover of a woodcraft model that shows what "Fort Mandan" looked like... with three sides finished on Christmas Day, 1804, as winter was rapidly settling in on them in ND.
This reconstruction as much to detail as possible, is near the Missouri in a site about 10 miles from where it is originally thought to have been. The original fort was found by Lewis and Clark on their return to have been burned and washed away by the river.
The rooms were small, well constructed with a fireplace to keep warm. Note the rope beds and buffalo robes.
The wife of a French interpreter Charbonneau, named Sacagawea, played a crucial role in the success of the trip and even traveled with her baby whom Clark named "Pomp."
At the Knife River site, the village where Sacagewea lived is pocked with depressions in the soil where the earth lodges once stood. It was fun to see the site identified as her home village.
The Knife river joins the Missouri nearby. It has steep sides and you can imagine scores of earth lodges on both sides of the river.
There was a terrible small pox outbreak in the mid 1800's that decimated their numbers, and the earth lodges just collapsed and left these round depressions where they once stood.
A photo from the air shows the depressions clearly.
The story of Lewis and Clark and Sacagewea is truly a fascinating and a remarkable part of US history.
