Knife River

Better buttes

I've had a hard time describing the irregular hills along the Missouri river. We were among them again today and I hope this picture gives a better view. I also caught a picture of this road sign. The profile of the Indian indicates a state road. I had to look at it a couple of times to see the image but was delighted when my slow brain figured it out. Much more interesting than the NC diamond.

State road sign

Our first stop of the day was north of
Bismark, about 10 miles north of where we were yesterday, the site of Fort Clark. It was not really a military fort and was not built until 20 some years after the Corps of Discovery passed through but it was just across the river from where the real Fort Mandan would have been. It was a fur trading post and another village of earthlodges. Again, for protection, it was on a bluff over a tributary of the Missouri. There was nothing there but a trail, a stone hut built by the CCC, public bathrooms (thank you!) and interpretive signs. And an incredible

CCC building at Fort Clark

view. And LOTS of wind. Anyone not born here would find it a challenge to acclimate to constant buffeting. Every public building we passed had a sign indicating fire risk and most of the large farms had huge irrigation rigs, so living with the challenging climate is major fact of prairie life.

Looking through the old to the new

The wind has its place, though, and I caught this picture of the new North Dakota through a window of the past. (Click to enlarge if you can't see the horizon).

Our next stop was the Knife River Indian Village National Historic Site. Apparently, this was Sakakawea's home village--after she'd been kidnapped from the Shoshone and given as payment in gambling to her French trapper husband. Because she could speak the language of the western tribes, and the north

Missouri at Sakakawea's home

Plains tribes, and French so she could translate to her husband, she became an invaluable member of the Corps of Discovery.

There was an interesting interpretive center and a mile long walk through what would have been the village to the banks of the Missouri. A bend in the river is cutting away at the banks and archeologists hang from wooden scaffolds to collect what is revealed. A berm has been created to protect this section of the bend from further erosion.

Tobacco

At the entrance to the Center, I was frankly startled to see good old North Carolina tobacco with an interpretive sign. Apparently the Indians recognized the health problems created by smoking. They urged their young warriors not to smoke as it would reduce their capacity to run swiftly. However, once a warrior reached 60 and was basically retired from hunting and warrioring, he was encouraged to smoke. It was the old men that cultivated it and cured it. Are you listening, young'uns?

Behind the Center was a garden where the rangers cultivated the Three Sisters. If you look closely at the picture you will see beans entwining the stalks of corn and squash leaves shading out the weeds.

The Three Sisters

The pink hat is Ruthie's and is there for a reason. Earlier, as we stood buffeted by the wind at Fort Clark and overlooking the Indian village site there, Ruthie wondered how they ever got corn to grow and not be damaged by the strong winds. When we got to this garden of native corn, Ruthie put her hat there to show how short the native corn is--about 3.5 feet max. Rough as the wind there was, it seemed to be doing just fine.

The Indian women used hoes made from buffalo shoulder blades to weed their crops. The ranger said it would have been a much easier job before so many invasive species arrived. Another unfortunate gift of the white man.

Lutheran Church

One thing that has struck me on this trip is the lack of historic buildings. Several years ago, when my grandmother's house was to be sold, I drove my son up to Indiana to have one last look at the house and show him around the state by back road. The tall, old Victorian farm houses, of which my grandmother's was one, were beautifully kept, as were their grounds. It appeared, though, that few were actually used as homes and that most of the farms were leased out, probably to corporations. We drove through many small towns, some just a few buildings at a crossroad, that looked as if there had been no new construction since the 1960s. It was almost spooky to see things so totally unchanged since my childhood. In North Dakota, it looked like everything we saw had been built
since the 1980s. We saw almost no country churches and no old homes except for a few very rare small clapboard buildings abandoned in the middle of fields. Everything was new construction--the apartments and shops around our campground, the farm houses we drove by, the churches in the towns we drove through. Either this part of the state wasn't populated until recently (highly unlikely) or folks were so glad to get rid of the old buildings, they did just that. We were totally surprised when we came across this old Lutheran church. As much as we scan for old homes and buildings, this is truly the only one we saw.

So we have rested. We are on the road again early tomorrow to Fort Peck via Fort Union Indian Trading Post and Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Stay tuned!