537 - Fort Clark Trading Post State Historic Site

You may notice many curious depressions in the landscape around you here at the Fort Clark State Historic Site. These indentations are the remnants of past events–two bustling nineteenth century fur trade posts were once located here. So too was an earthlodge village. Together, these marks on the land serve as a reminder of the ramifications of westward expansion and the hardships faced by those living on the Northern Plains at the time.

Here on these bluffs above the Missouri River, the Mandan people established an earthlodge village in 1822. The melting snow in spring would mark the time for the women of the village to begin planting their crops in the fertile soil while the men hunted for bison and other game throughout the summer. Come autumn, the village worked together to harvest beans, corn, squash, and tobacco to help them through the winter in the wooded Missouri River bottomlands. The furs and hides of the bison were incredibly useful for the Mandan, but they were also highly valuable to the trappers and traders whose presence on the plains was only increasing. Several years would pass this way in their village, which they called Mitu’tahakto’s, until 1830, when a trading post was also built here to further facilitate trade between the American Fur Company and the tribes of the area.

As long as the goal line on a football field and almost as wide, Fort Clark, as the trading post came to be known, was surrounded by a wooden palisade and would’ve stood in stark contrast to the Mandan village’s earthlodges. The post was supplied by steamboats traveling up the Missouri from St. Louis. The first to arrive at Fort Clark was the Yellowstone, in June 1832. Villagers would have heard the steamboat coming even before they caught their first ever sight of such a vessel, billowing smoke as it chugged up to its landing near the trading post. The delivery of goods and visitors by boat was essential for maintaining Fort Clark and later, a second trading post on the site called Primeau’s. The steamboats carried back with them dozens of packs of bison robes and beaver pelts. And so business continued as usual until 1837, when the steamboat St. Peter docked at the trading posts carrying more than just goods. Passengers infected with smallpox were brought ashore for care, bringing with them an epidemic that was sweeping across the Great Plains. The Mandan and other tribes, who had no previous exposure to smallpox, were particularly vulnerable. Despite the construction of their own palisade around their village, nearly ninety percent of the Mandan people were wiped out by the smallpox epidemic; the rest fled Mitu’tahakto’s to reside with their Hidatsa relatives at the mouth of the Knife River.

Over the years, epidemics would come and go with the steamboats, including an outbreak of cholera in 1851 and another bout of smallpox in 1856, primarily affecting the members of the Arikara people who had moved into the village left by the Mandan. After struggles with fire and an attack by the Dakota, the site was finally abandoned in 1861. Twenty-two hundred archaeological features remain to tell the story of Fort Clark State Historic Site. The ruins of the earthlodges are indicated by large, circular depressions, while shallow trenches mark the palisades around the village and trading posts - and a cluster of smaller, ovular pits and mounds near the railroad tracks identify nearly eight hundred gravesites, a somber reminder of the devastating event.