Fort Abraham Lincoln State Park - The Visitor Center and Museum

Today we visited Fort Abraham State Park and spent the whole day here. It was a very interesting stop. 

The Visitor Center and Museum

You could have spent the whole day in the Museum learning about the Mandan and how they lived. they had excellent exhibits and information signage.

I really loved the area where they displayed the Mandan language and the symbols they used to describe their world.

A composite of the Mandan Village as it stood when it was occupied

According to Wikipedia, "The Mandan historically lived along both banks of the Upper Missouri River and two of its tributaries—the Heart and Knife rivers— in present-day North and South Dakota. Speakers of Mandan, a Siouan language, they developed a settled, agrarian culture. They established permanent villages featuring large, round, earth lodges, some 40 feet (12 m) in diameter, surrounding a central plaza. Matrilineal families lived in the lodges. The Mandan were a great trading nation, trading especially their large corn surpluses with other tribes in exchange for bison meat and fat. Food was the primary item, but they also traded for horses, guns, and other trade goods."

"The Mandan population was 3,600 in the early 18th century.^[2] It is estimated to have been 10,000-15,000 before European encounter. Decimated by a widespread smallpox epidemic in 1781, the people had to abandon several villages, and remnants of the Hidatsa also gathered with them in a reduced number of villages. In 1836, there were more than 1,600 full-blood Mandans but, following another smallpox epidemic in 1836-37, this number was estimated to have dropped to 125 by 1838.

In the 20th century, the people began to recover. In the 1990s, 6,000 people were enrolled in the Three Affiliated Tribes.^[2] In the 2010 Census, 1,171 people reported Mandan ancestry. Some 365 of them identified as full-bloods, and 806 had partial Mandan ancestry."

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After we finished looking around in the Museum where we could have spent a full day, we headed over to another area of the park - The On A Slant Village.  It is a reconstructed version of the 400-year-old Mandan village, which thrived for 200 years. The Mandans were hunters and gardeners who lived in permanent villages. Five reconstructed earth lodges are on the site.