This statue was at the entrance. These are my good friends Rob and Pat, who give me rides everywhere.
Bismark is the area where Lewis and Clark decided to stop for the winter. They have been traveling all summer and when they reach this point, it late October and it’s starting to snow. So they build a small fort near the large Mandan Indian villages.
This is Mark, one of the Wagonmasters, trying on a buffalo robe. They wear that blue shirt and yellow hat every single day.An Indian making a canoe out of a log.A pretty impressive Mandan. The Missouri River actually looks like that in the background – very wide, even this far north.These statues were so big. This is supposed to be Captain Clark.
Next we visited a replica of Fort Mandan. This was one of the most impressive sites we’ve visited so far. This fort was to house about 40-50 people. It was small and built in a triangular shape out of logs. It was furnished as it might have been back then and we were allowed to walk through all the rooms. This might be an exhaustive set of photos only because it was so impressive.
The storeroom held vegetables given to them by the Mandan – corn, squash, berries.The storeroom also held the whiskey. They were given 1 dram a day, and ran out halfway through the trip.These were the gifts they gave Indians they passed along the way – blankets, flags, medals, clothes. Bales of something.Captain Clark’s desk would have looked like this because he drew the maps.Whereas, Captain Lewis’ desk would look like this because he was the one gathering all the plant and animal specimens and keeping a journal.They slept on rope beds (remember the bed keys from an earlier post?) and used lots of buffalo skins to keep warm.And here in Bismark at Fort Mandan is where Sacajawea was introduced into the picture. Lewis and Clark hired her husband Charbonneau as an interpreter. Sacajawea came along and had her baby John Baptiste Charbonneau at the fort. (They called the baby Pomp.) She carried him in the cradle board at the foot of the bed and used cattail fluff for diapers.One final room was the blacksmith.
Now for some fun. One gun that impressed everyone was the blunderbuss. The barrel on the gun was about 3 inches wide and it weighed 40 pounds. They let us pick it up. Here I am!
It was even heavier than you could imagine.
And one last photo, my favorite character, Seaman the dog.
Seaman, Lewis’ Newfoundland dog.
One Reply to “Bismark”
Neat museum! Very impressive lifting that 40 lb gun! You need to send that picture to your trainer!
Neat museum! Very impressive lifting that 40 lb gun! You need to send that picture to your trainer!