531 - Double Ditch - LaVerendrye
In 1783, Pierre Gaultier deVarennes et de La Verendrye, a French-Canadian fur trader, set out from Fort La Reine near today’s Portage la Prairie in Manitoba in search of a people referred to as the “Mantanne”, now believed to be the Mandan. Verendrye had heard from Assiniboine traders in southern Canada, that the Mandan were villagers who lived in wood-framed houses, like Frenchmen, and grew squash and corn along the banks of a river. He was curious about the Mandan and the river, and eager to expand his trade on the Northern Plains. Verendrye assembled a westward expedition, accompanied by his two sons, two hired Frenchmen, and dozens of Assiniboin men and women. As he neared one of the seven Mandan villages on November 28, 1738, he arranged a rendezvous with several Mandan men to ensure they would be well received.
“I confess I was greatly surprised, as I expected to see people quite different…according to the stories that had been told to us,” he wrote of his first impression of the Mandan. Unfortunately, no record was made to offer the Mandan’s impression of the French! Nevertheless, Verendrye accompanied his new hosts to their village, where he composed the first known report by a European of the Mandan and their lifeways.
“Their fort is very well provided with cellars where they store all they have in the way of grains, meat, fat, dressed skins and bearskins. They have a great stock of these things, which form the money of the country.” He also noted that among the items they traded, leather goods were the most in-demand. “Of all the tribes, the Mandan are the most skillful in dressing leather, and they work very delicately in hair and feathers. They are sharp traders.”
Verendrye also described the village itself, which stood on a bluff a considerable distance from the river. “I decided to have the huts counted,” he wrote. “There were about one hundred and thirty houses. All the streets, squares, and cabins are uniform in appearance; often our Frenchmen would lose their way in going about. They keep the street and open spaces very clean; the ramparts are smooth and wide; the palisade is supported on cross pieces mortised into posts fifteen feet apart with a lining. The fort is built on an elevation in mid-prairie with a ditch over fifteen feet deep and from fifteen to eighteen feet wide…”
Individual houses, he said, were “large and spacious, divided into several apartments by wide planks. Nothing is lying about; all their belongings are placed in large bags hung on posts.”
The exact location of this first encounter between the Mandan and French traders is a mystery lost to time. In comparison to a neighboring village later visited by Verendrye’s son Louis-Joseph, it was quite small and far from the banks of the Missouri. Some historians believe it to be what is now known as the Larson village site. In which case, the larger neighboring village would most certainly have been Double Ditch. Still, others cite the trader’s descriptions of geography and proximity to other tribes as indicators that the location is now submerged beneath the Lake Sakakawea reservoir.
Verendrye stayed with the Mandan only eleven days, and never saw the Missouri River. But his sons returned to the Mandan villages numerous times as they explored the Northern Plains, providing valuable, albeit one-sided documentation of the people they met and places they saw in the years before European diseases—specifically smallpox epidemic–left their mark on the people of the Plains.