Lewis and Clark Trail History
Pre-Columbian Mandan Villages in North Dakota
The Lewis and Clark Expedition spent the winter of 1804-1805 in villages belonging to the Mandan tribe near present Washburn, North Dakota. Other Great Plains tribes lead a nomadic existence tracking herds of buffalo, but the Mandans established permanent villages. These permanent settlements featured round, earthen lodges surrounding a central plaza.
The Mandans were first encountered by Europeans in 1738, and their friendliness and willingness to trade brought many traders and fur trappers to their villages over the next century. By the time Lewis and Clark reached them, epidemics of smallpox and whooping cough and attacks by neighboring tribes had significantly diminished their population.
The area surrounding Bismarck, ND contains remains of Mandan villages established in Pre-Columbian (before Columbus arrived) times. The oldest of these is the Menoken Village, inhabited by a people who were actually ancestors of the Mandans, and were primarily hunters and gatherers. Menoken Village consisted of approximately 30 oval-shaped, earth-covered houses and a prominent fortification system. The village has been dated to around AD 1200.
Huff Indian Village dates back to about AD 1450, perhaps two hundred years before Euro-Americans reached the Missouri Valley area. The village is a very large, well-planned community where perhaps a thousand or more people lived. Village residents practiced a combination of farming and bison hunting, resulting in a diversified and flexible economy. Farming produced a surplus of dried corn, beans, and squash which was stored for use and traded to nomadic, non-farming tribes.
Double Ditch Indian Village was a large earthlodge village inhabited by the Mandan Indians from 1490 through 1785. Mandan oral history relates that Double Ditch was one of seven to nine villages simultaneously occupied near the mouth of the Heart River (a tributary of the Missouri). The Mandan population in this area totaled about 10,000 during this era. The earthlodge villages were centers of trade between the Mandans, their nomadic neighbors, and later, Euro-American traders.
Smallpox epidemics in 1781-1782 were apparently responsible for the abandonment of Double Ditch and all the other Mandan villages near the Heart River. The remaining Mandans moved to new villages farther upriver, which is where Lewis and Clark reached them in October 1804.
