USA: North Dakota – Lewis & Clark Interp. Center

🧭 Lewis, Clark and a Woman Who Held It All Together – Washburn, North Dakota

We pulled into Washburn, North Dakota, a small and largely unremarkable town sitting on the banks of the Missouri River, not entirely sure what to expect. Washburn isn’t exactly on the global tourist trail. It’s the kind of place you drive through rather than to, which made the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center all the more of a surprise. It turned out to be genuinely excellent, and we spent a very happy hour and a half inside, which for a couple of people who weren’t entirely sure they’d find anything worth stopping for, felt like a minor revelation.

🏛️ The Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center, Washburn

The centre itself is impressive. Properly impressive, not in a “well, it’s better than nothing” sort of way, but in a “this is a serious and well-funded institution that clearly cares about what it’s doing” sort of way. The permanent exhibitions are thoughtfully laid out, well-interpreted, and mercifully free of the sort of dusty, faded, laminated panels you sometimes find in smaller American heritage sites. Everything felt current and considered.

The story it tells begins in earnest in 1804, when Meriwether Lewis and William Clark arrived in the area leading what became known as the Corps of Discovery – a military expedition commissioned by President Thomas Jefferson following the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Jefferson had just acquired a vast swathe of territory from the French – roughly 828,000 square miles, which doubled the size of the United States at a stroke and cost around fifteen million dollars, which even accounting for inflation was an extraordinary bargain – and he wanted to know what on earth he’d actually bought. So off went Lewis and Clark with a team of around forty men, tasked with finding a route to the Pacific Ocean, mapping the land, cataloguing the wildlife and plants, and making contact with the indigenous nations along the way.

They set off from Camp Dubois, near present-day Hartford, Illinois, in May 1804, travelling up the Missouri River in a keelboat and two smaller vessels. By the time they reached what is now North Dakota in October of that year, the weather was deteriorating rapidly, and they made the sensible decision to stop and sit out the winter rather than press on into the unknown in freezing conditions. Sensible is perhaps an understatement – temperatures in that part of the world in winter can drop to something that would make a Yorkshireman wince.

🏕️ Fort Mandan and the Winter of 1804–05

The Corps built a small wooden fort – Fort Mandan, named after their neighbours – on the north bank of the Missouri River, not far from where the interpretive centre now stands. It was a fairly basic affair, triangular in plan, with two rows of huts and a high fence, and it measured just about fifty-eight feet along each of its two sides. Not the most palatial of winter quarters, but it kept the wind out, more or less.

While they were there, Lewis and Clark did something rather clever. Instead of simply waiting for the thaw, they got on with it. They made extensive notes on the geography, the weather, the wildlife, and the people around them. Their journals from this period are detailed and often surprisingly readable – Lewis in particular had a decent prose style, which you don’t always expect from a soldier turned explorer. Clark, by contrast, was a famously erratic speller, which adds a certain homely charm to his entries.

The local people they befriended were the Mandan and the Hidatsa, two distinct but neighbouring nations who had lived in the region for centuries. The centre does a fine job of documenting their lives, and it’s worth pausing here because it’s easy to let the Lewis and Clark story swallow everything else, when in fact the Mandan and Hidatsa are at least as interesting.

🌽 The Mandan and Hidatsa: Farmers of the Northern Plains

The Mandan had been settled in the Missouri River valley for perhaps a thousand years by the time Lewis and Clark pitched up. They were not the nomadic hunters of popular imagination – that’s a stereotype that gets applied rather too broadly to the indigenous peoples of North America. The Mandan were sophisticated agricultural people who grew maize, beans, squash and sunflowers in carefully managed plots along the river bottomlands. They lived in substantial earth lodges – large, circular, semi-subterranean structures that were warm in winter and cool in summer, and which could house an extended family along with their horses and dogs. By all accounts, reasonably comfortable, if aromatic.

The Hidatsa were similar in many respects and the two nations had close trading and social relationships, living in adjacent villages and intermarrying. Together they formed a significant economic hub on the northern plains, trading with other nations across a wide area. When Lewis and Clark arrived, they found a functioning, complex society that had absolutely no need of two American army officers turning up uninvited. Nevertheless, both sides got along tolerably well, and the winter of 1804 to 1805 proved enormously useful to the expedition.

The centre’s exhibitions on Mandan and Hidatsa farming traditions are particularly good. There’s real attention given to the agricultural knowledge these communities had accumulated – the particular varieties of maize they’d developed for the short northern growing season, the way they managed soil, the role of women as the primary farmers and landowners. It’s the sort of detail that gets overlooked in the grander narrative of westward expansion, and it was good to see it treated seriously.

🎨 Prince Maximilian and Karl Bodmer: The Artists Who Followed

The centre also covers those who came after Lewis and Clark, and here the story takes a rather wonderful detour. In 1833 and 1834, a German prince arrived in the same region. His name was Alexander Philipp Maximilian, Prince of Wied-Neuwied – usually mercifully shortened to Prince Maximilian zu Wied – and he was a naturalist and explorer of considerable ambition and means. He’d already spent two years in Brazil documenting the wildlife and indigenous peoples there, so the American West was a natural next project.

He brought with him a young Swiss painter named Karl Bodmer, who was only twenty-three when they set off, and who turned out to be extraordinarily talented. Together they travelled up the Missouri River, much as Lewis and Clark had done, spending the winter of 1833 to 1834 at Fort Clark, near the Mandan villages. Bodmer spent that time painting. He produced meticulous, technically accomplished portraits of Mandan and Hidatsa people, detailed landscapes of the Missouri River country, and careful studies of dress, ceremony, and daily life.

When Maximilian published his account of the journey in 1839 – in German, naturally – it was accompanied by eighty-one aquatint prints based on Bodmer’s paintings. These prints are now considered among the most important visual documents of the American West ever produced. They are certainly among the most beautiful. The timing was, with the benefit of hindsight, heartbreaking. Within a few years of Bodmer and Maximilian’s visit, the Mandan were virtually wiped out by a smallpox epidemic that swept through their villages in 1837. It killed perhaps ninety percent of them – a nation of several thousand people reduced to a few dozen survivors almost overnight. Bodmer’s images are therefore not just art. They are a record of a world that was about to disappear, painted by a young man who couldn’t possibly have known that.

The centre has reproductions of many of the Bodmer prints, and they really are remarkable. The level of detail and the obvious care with which indigenous subjects were treated – painted as individuals, with dignity, rather than as curiosities – makes them stand apart from much of the ethnographic art of the period.

👩 Sacagawea – or Sakakawea – or Sacakawea

And now we come to the part of the story that caused Emily a moment of mild confusion and rather more exasperation than was strictly necessary.

Emily had studied the story of Sacagawea at school, as many people have, so she knew the broad outline. What she wasn’t prepared for was arriving in North Dakota and finding the name spelled Sakakawea everywhere. Different signs, different spellings, and a certain air of local insistence that the North Dakota version was the correct one. She wasn’t wrong to be confused. The name question is genuinely complicated, and the centre addresses it well.

The short version is this: the woman known to history by various spellings of her name was a Shoshone woman who had been kidnapped as a child, probably around 1800, by a Hidatsa raiding party. She was taken back to the Hidatsa villages on the Missouri and grew up there. Her name in the Hidatsa language – Sakakawea – means Bird Woman. The more widely used spelling Sacagawea comes from the Shoshone language, where it means Boat Pusher, or alternatively, depending on who you ask, something else entirely. Linguists and historians have argued about this for years, which is exactly the sort of argument that linguists and historians enjoy enormously and everyone else finds slightly baffling.

By the time Lewis and Clark arrived at the Mandan and Hidatsa villages in the winter of 1804, Sakakawea was living with a French-Canadian fur trader named Toussaint Charbonneau, who had either purchased her or won her in a card game, depending on which account you read. Charbonneau was the sort of man who turns up in history books as a supporting character – not particularly admirable, not particularly capable, but present at the right moment. He spoke French and several indigenous languages, which made him useful as an interpreter. Lewis and Clark hired him, and Sakakawea came with him.

Lewis and Clark’s reasoning for wanting Sakakawea on the expedition was practical rather than sentimental. Their planned route westward would take them through the territory of the Shoshone nation, and they needed horses to cross the Rocky Mountains. To get horses from the Shoshone, they needed to communicate with them. To communicate with them, they needed someone who spoke Shoshone. That person was Sakakawea.

What Lewis and Clark perhaps hadn’t fully anticipated was just how useful she would prove to be in other ways. Her presence – and particularly the presence of her infant son – apparently signalled to the various nations they encountered that this was not a war party. Women and babies do not generally travel with raiding expeditions. It was a kind of living peace flag, which must have been simultaneously reassuring and somewhat undignified for the Corps of Discovery, however effective.

The baby in question – a boy named Jean Baptiste, though Clark nicknamed him Pompey, which the child apparently bore with good grace – was born on the 11th of February 1805, just weeks before the Corps set off westward again in April. Sakakawea carried him with her for the entire journey to the Pacific Ocean and back, which covered somewhere in the region of eight thousand miles in total. By any measure, that is an extraordinary thing to do with a newborn.

She served as interpreter, guide, and on at least one occasion as a negotiator of some importance when the expedition encountered the Shoshone and discovered that the chief, Cameahwait, was her brother. That particular reunion must have been one of the more astonishing moments in the entire journey, and Lewis at least had the wit to record it with something approaching appropriate wonder in his journal.

❓ What Happened Next

Lewis and Clark documented all of this, and their journals – which run to millions of words across the full expedition – remain the primary source for the whole extraordinary enterprise. What happened to Sakakawea after the expedition returned in September 1806 is rather less clear, and it’s this uncertainty that has contributed so much to her mythical status.

The most widely accepted historical account holds that she died in December 1812 at Fort Manuel in present-day South Dakota, of what was recorded as a putrid fever. She would have been in her mid-twenties. Her son Jean Baptiste was subsequently raised and educated by William Clark, who had developed a genuine fondness for the boy – calling him my little dancing boy Pomp in his journals, which is rather touching. Jean Baptiste went on to have quite the life of his own, eventually travelling to Europe with a German prince, becoming a fur trapper, and living long enough to participate in the California Gold Rush of 1849.

There is, however, a competing tradition among the Shoshone people that Sakakawea survived, returned to her people, and lived to a very old age, dying on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming in 1884. The evidence for this is oral rather than documentary, and most historians treat it with polite scepticism, but it remains part of the story.

Either way, the uncertainty is fitting. A woman who was kidnapped as a child, taken hundreds of miles from her homeland, given or sold to a fur trader, and then carried a newborn baby across eight thousand miles of unknown territory deserves at least the dignity of a story that doesn’t tie up too neatly.

💭 Reflections

We came to Washburn not expecting very much and left rather glad we’d stopped. The interpretive centre is genuinely good – well laid out, honest about the complexity of the history, and respectful of the people who come off worst in the larger story of American expansion, which is most of the indigenous people involved.

The Lewis and Clark story is a remarkable one by any measure. Two men sent off into the unknown with a team of soldiers and a handful of maps, returning two years later with journals full of observations that changed American understanding of the continent. But the centre does something useful by insisting that Lewis and Clark didn’t do it alone, and that the land they were “discovering” had been known and managed and lived on for centuries before they arrived.

Sakakawea – or Sacagawea, or Sakakewea, take your pick – is the most obvious example of that, but the Mandan and Hidatsa communities, the farmers and traders who had been there for a thousand years, matter too. And Bodmer’s prints, sitting quietly in the exhibition cases, are a reminder of how quickly that world was lost.

We got back in the car feeling we’d learned something. That doesn’t always happen. When it does, it’s worth noting.