We drove over to the Fort Mandan State Historic Site for a tour of the reconstructed Fort Mandan. Lewis and Clark built this fort and wintered in it over the 1804/1805 winter. It has to be the smallest fort we have ever seen but it was just a place to stay when it was impossible to travel during the winter. The original site was actually about 12 miles from where this fort was built but the exact location isn't really known.
Entrance to the Fort
Fireplaces were the only heat in the fort and it didn't stay all that warm inside. Many of the men got frostbite but they all survived the winter.
Some of the staples that kept them alive during the winter
This young man was our guide through the Fort. He was very knowledgeable. In fact, probably too much so. We were there for hours and there was no place to sit down!!
According to Wikipedia, Lewis and Clark appear to have first met Sacagawea at Fort Mandan. Her husband, (who I had never heard of) was Toussaint Charbonneau and he served as a Hidatsa interpreter for the expedition, and the journals imply that she lived at the fort with him. Their son Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, whom she kept with her throughout the expedition, was born on February 11, 1805, possibly at the fort."
When we finished at the Fort, we wandered around the grounds of the park and walked up to view the river. We looked for birds but they flew by without even posing once for us! Then we returned to the Interpretative Center to view areas that we hadn't seen yet.
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