Getting a taste of Corps' daily life

By John Krist,
Senior reporter

History buffs with an interest in the 18th and 19th century fur trade gather at significant sites such as Fort Mandan in North Dakota to re-enact trapper-trader rendezvous.

WASHBURN, N.D. -- With a resounding THUNK, the flying tomahawk slammed blade-first into the end of a log and stuck there. A young woman wearing a long calico skirt retrieved the weapon, handed it to me, and showed me how to emulate her deadly technique.

It didn't seem that hard. I cocked my arm and let fly at the target, about 20 feet away. With a resounding SWOOSH, my toss missed the log entirely, the tomahawk skittering through the grass with all the lethal efficiency of an errant horseshoe.

I shrugged. She smiled. Then she handed the tomahawk to a child of about 5, who began waving it around. I took a sudden interest in the wares of traders whose canvas tents and smoky fires seemed out of range.

It was a drizzly day at the end of June, cool and overcast, the air a humid stew of drizzle and mosquitoes. History buffs dressed in homespun and buckskin had set up a fur trader encampment outside the walls of Fort Mandan, a faithful replica of the log structure in which members of Meriwether Lewis' and William Clark's Corps of Discovery spent the winter of 1804-05.

Fort Mandan Historic Site is situated in a bend of the Missouri River just west of Washburn, a small town about 30 miles north of Bismarck, the capital of North Dakota. Owned and operated by a private foundation, the fort and its wooded surroundings memorialize a crucial episode in the eventful journey of Lewis and Clark across the continent. As such, it is an essential stop for anyone seeking to understand the expedition and to retrace its path.

At a January campout, visitors to Fort Mandan Historic Site near Washburn, N.D., get a taste of the Northern Plains winter endured by members of the Lewis and Clark expedition. The explorers' journals report temperatures often reaching 40 below zero, and note that many of the men suffered frostbite.

The explorers built their fort near several villages inhabited by the Mandan and Hidatsa tribes, sedentary agriculturists who lived in complexes of dome-shaped earthen lodges and grew corn, beans, squash and sunflowers. In the early 19th century, the villages constituted an extended community of about 5,000 people, making it one of the largest urban centers in North America -- five times the size of St. Louis at the time, more populous than Washington, D.C.

The Mandan and Hidatsa villages also were the center of a continental trading network involving scores of native tribes as well as British, French and Canadian merchants and trappers. The villages also marked the westernmost extent of American and European knowledge of the upper Missouri River and the Louisiana Territory.

During the five-month winter sojourn at Fort Mandan, members of the Lewis and Clark expedition forged a new sense of unity and purpose while crowded together in close quarters. From their Indian neighbors, they acquired important information about the trail that lay ahead of them, grew familiar with Plains customs and politics, and learned how to survive under some of the harshest climatic conditions North America has to offer.

And it was here among the Mandans and Hidatsas that the explorers met a pregnant teen-ager named Sacagawea, who would become one of the most famous women in American history.

Landmarks of history

Although no likeness of her was drawn during her lifetime, Sacagawea is the subject of scores of paintings and statues on display around the country. This larger-than-life bronze, depicting her with her infant son, Jean Baptiste, stands on the grounds of the state capitol in Bismarck, N.D.

Sacagawea was Shoshone by birth, a native of the mountain prairies of eastern Idaho. She'd been taken captive in western Montana by a Hidatsa raiding party when she was 10 or 11 years old and brought hundreds of miles across the Plains to the complex of Mandan and Hidatsa villages.

She was living there, a pregnant 16-year-old "married" to a 45-year-old French Canadian fur trader (who had purchased her and another captive girl from the Hidatsa), when Lewis and Clark arrived in October 1804 and began building their fort. That winter, the explorers hired the fur trader, Toussaint Charbonneau, as an interpreter. He, Sacagawea, and their infant son, Jean Baptiste, born that February, accompanied the Corps of Discovery to the Pacific and back.

Relatively little is actually known about Sacagawea beyond abbreviated references to her in the historical record and unreliable legends handed down among Plains tribes. She apparently was not painted or drawn during life, so no one even knows what she looked like. That has not deterred novelists, painters and sculptors from imagining her; she is, by some historians' accounting, the subject of more statues in the United States than any other woman.

One of them is on the grounds of the North Dakota Heritage Center in Bismarck. The 12-foot-tall bronze depicts Sacagawea carrying her infant in a sling on her back, suggesting something of the magnitude of the challenge facing her -- a teen mom with a nursing infant uprooted from her home and dragged off across the wilderness in the company of strangers -- when Lewis and Clark put her husband on the payroll. A fuller discussion of Sacagawea's role.

Fort Mandan and The Heritage Center, which has an excellent museum, are among several historical attractions in the Bismarck area. Across the Missouri River from Bismarck is Fort Abraham Lincoln, from which Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and the 7th Cavalry rode to disaster at the Little Bighorn in Montana. The state park that preserves the fort also encompasses the remains of On-A-Slant villages, a Mandan settlement inhabited between 1575 and 1781. Lewis and Clark recorded passing its abandoned ruins when they traveled up the river in autumn of 1804.

There is also an elaborate Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center in Washburn, which was celebrating the grand opening of a new $2 million wing on the weekend of my visit in June, as well as Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site, which preserves the archaeological remains of the five villages -- three Mandan and two Hidatsa -- that Lewis and Clark found when they arrived.

Musician Daniel Slosberg of Los Angeles tours the country full time as Pierre Cruzatte, a skilled boatman and fiddler who accompanied Lewis and Clark. Slosberg lectures on the importance of music to the expedition, suggesting that song and dance kept the explorers' spirits high and helped ease relations with Indian tribes.

The fur trader rendezvous I found at the fort during my visit was part of the overall celebration of the Interpretive Center's grand opening that weekend. I wandered around the grounds after lunch, stopping to admire the skins, furs, beads, leather goods and other craft items offered for sale in the tents. A strolling fiddler was entertaining the small crowd of visitors. Dressed in period costume and sporting an eye patch, he had adopted the character of Pierre Cruzatte, a skilled boatman and musician who accompanied Lewis and Clark. Son of a French father and Omaha mother, Cruzatte was fluent in the universal Indian sign language of the Plains as well as the Omaha dialect; Lewis hired him in St. Charles, Mo., as an interpreter and attached him to the permanent party after swearing him in as a private in the U.S. Army.

This modern-day Pvt. Cruzatte turned out to be Daniel Slosberg of Los Angeles, a veteran musician and educator who has forged a new career teaching history through song and story. A fiddler since the age of 5, he is a graduate of the University of California at Santa Barbara and studied for many years with masters of the Scottish, Irish, French-Canadian, Klezmer and Appalachian musical traditions, developing the skills that eventually landed him a job with the famed Aman Folk Ensemble. While touring the country, Slosberg said, he found himself increasingly drawn to the story of Lewis and Clark.

"As I learned later," he said, "music, song and dance played a key role in the expedition." Slosberg now tours the nation full-time as Cruzatte, bringing the story of Lewis and Clark to life through music at schools and gatherings such as this one.

To a generation accustomed to feasting on a vast menu of entertainment options -- portable CD players, computer and video games, television, movies, books, radios -- fiddle music and dancing seem hardly adequate to chase away the blues and pass the time during a trip that lasted 28 months.

But as I had discovered during a long, cold evening in January 2001, simple music and fellowship of the sort enjoyed by the Corps of Discovery have an uncomplicated power to leaven loneliness and warm the spirit. My earlier visit to North Dakota also offered chilly insight into the meteorological challenges expedition members faced as they waited out winter on the northern Plains.

Winter interlude

At Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site, visitors may tour a re-creation of a native earth lodge. Constructed by the Mandan and Hidatsa tribes, the hemispherical lodges featured a thick, insulating cover of dirt, making them snug havens even in the harshest conditions.

We gathered before daybreak on Jan. 20, 2001, in the North Dakota Heritage Center on the grounds of the state capitol in Bismarck. The temperature hovered around zero degrees, and crusty snow covered the skin of ice that clung to sidewalks and streets.

Twenty-six of us had signed up for the weekend encampment at Fort Mandan, sponsored by the North Dakota Council on the Arts, the North Dakota Tourism Department and the State Historical Society of North Dakota. The purpose, according to the brochure, was to get "a REAL taste of what Lewis and Clark experienced in January of 1805," as well as to learn about the history and culture of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara tribes, and to observe the Plains environment in winter.

The brochure also offered a warning: "Strenuous physical activity is required. There will be primitive conditions and facilities."

There were a few reporters in the group, but most participants were local people with an interest in history. As we introduced ourselves, I became the source of much amusement as they tried to figure out what motivated a Southern Californian to leave his sunny beach community for the northern Plains in the dead of winter. Several seemed half convinced that I would seize up like the Tin Man in a rainstorm as soon as North Dakota's arctic air hit my suntanned California skin.

We loaded into state-owned vans for the 30-minute drive to Fort Mandan, where we were greeted by Mike Scholl and Tim McLaughlin of the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center, dressed as members of the Corps of Discovery. McLaughlin fired a black-powder rifle in welcome as we stamped our cold feet in the snow and looked longingly into the fort's small rooms, where cheery fires burned. The thunderclap of the exploding powder echoed across a minimalist landscape of skeletal cottonwoods and snowdrifts. A few hundred yards away, the Missouri River gleamed like stainless steel in the wan morning light.

We next were welcomed to the fort by buckskin-clad Meriwether Lewis, in the person of Clay Jenkinson, a humanities scholar at the University of Nevada, Reno, who has written books about Lewis and Thomas Jefferson, and who is host of a nationally syndicated public radio program called "The Thomas Jefferson Hour."

He noted that the location of Fort Mandan among the Hidatsa and Mandan villages was a shrewd one strategically. The largest population center in the American West, the five villages were at the center of a continental trade network, and it was likely that the expedition would encounter someone there who could provide accurate information about the unknown and unmapped lands to the west.

"When we left here," he said (in character), "I felt we were entering terra incognita."

Although it was turning into a sunny day, the air was quite cold, and those of us with moustaches soon found them bedecked with icicles formed by our frozen, condensed breath. Pens quickly ceased to function unless kept in an inside pocket next to the body.

"Imagine trying to write a journal under these conditions," Jenkinson/Lewis said.

Strictly speaking, journalists Lewis and Clark would not have faced quite the same challenge. Unlike me, they had the good sense to do their writing indoors next to the fire when the temperature dropped below zero.

After the welcome, we trekked to the parking lot and unloaded our gear. We were led to a collection of A-frame nylon tents erected below the fort along the edge of a clearing, where we were to spend the night. Plumbing at the tiny visitor center was shut off for the winter, so we would have to rely on an outhouse about 50 yards away.

At the gate to the Fort Mandan replica near Washburn, N.D., Roger Wendlick presents a romantic image in his historically accurate garb. When not dressed in animal hide, Wendlick wears more conventional clothes for his job as associate curator at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore.

One of the participants qualified as a bona fide Lewis and Clark fanatic. Roger Wendlick, an associate curator at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore., was dressed head to toe in buckskin, carried a knife and tomahawk in belt sheaths, wore a fur hat and had a buffalo robe draped across his shoulders. He was a colorful sight, and many of us had him pose for photos in front of the fort. Unlike Wendlick, most of us were relying on down, synthetic fleece, nylon and insulated boots to keep our extremities from suffering the indignity of frostbite, which afflicted members of the Lewis and Clark party from time to time.

We spent the next few hours in the company of guest lecturers, discussing medical practices, white and Indian, of the early 19th century, and roaming the frigid woods on snowshoes to learn about North Dakota's winter wildlife (in a word: scarce). As we tromped awkwardly along the bank of the Missouri, we looked vaguely like a procession of high-tech Eskimos in our colorful synthetic garb. Chunks of ice drifted past in the river's current, and sheets of ice rimmed the bank. Farther downstream, the broad, burly river was frozen solid from shore to shore.

As the sun began to fade, dropping over the river and casting spidery shadows from the leafless cottonwoods, we headed back to the visitor center to board our vans for the drive to Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site, about 10 miles away. The park preserves the remnants of three Mandan and Hidatsa villages, including the one where Sacagawea was living when Lewis and Clark met her.

Stories by firelight

Participants in a winter campout gather inside the Knife River earth lodge for dinner and storytelling, enjoying the warmth of the fire as the temperature outside drops to near zero.

We gathered in the Knife River visitor center, which has a central room shaped like a round Mandan earth lodge. Lisa Eckert, the park superintendent, greeted us and provided an overview of the archaeological resources protected at the site. After her introduction, we watched demonstrations of traditional painting on buckskin by JoEsther Parshall and her husband, Keith Bear, who also treated us to a performance on the wooden flutes he carves. The music was beautiful, haunting, the sound of wind slipping through tall grass and curling around weathered buttes.

As winter twilight descended, we headed to the replica earth lodge situated near the park's visitor center. The lodge was about 40 feet across and 15 feet high. Four thick cottonwood trunks supported the roof beams, which in turn supported a shell of woven willow branches topped with a foot-thick layer of packed earth. A large fire pit occupied the center of the floor, the smoke escaping -- most of it, anyway -- through a hole in the roof. The doorway was blocked by a thick buffalo robe hanging over the doorway; rattles made from buffalo hooves hung from the hide, to be jangled politely by visitors before entering.

Although snow covered the ground and cold winter twilight was flowing across the landscape like icy molasses, it was snug and warm inside the lodge. It also smelled good. Marilyn Hudson, of the Three Affiliated Tribes Museum on the Fort Berthold Reservation, had prepared a traditional meal of bison, venison, beans, fry bread, a mixture of dried corn and squash, and prairie turnips (the starchy root of a perennial legume known to the Indians as tipsin). We sat around the fire with our steaming plates and ate heartily, soon growing so warm that we removed coats and hats and gloves.

After dinner, Alex Gwin told stories of his ancestors, including Four Bears, a legendary Hidatsa chief whose name graces the new tribal casino on the Fort Berthold Reservation. That reservation is home to the descendents of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara living in the vicinity when Lewis and Clark passed through; diminished subsequently by disease and warfare, the survivors banded together for mutual support and protection and became known formally as the Three Affiliated Tribes.

As Gwin told stories of his ancestors' legendary deeds, a blazing fire at his feet and a painted buffalo hide at his back, time seemed to stand still. Stars gleamed like white gems above the smoke hole in the lodge's roof. Firelight illuminated a circle of upturned faces, Gwin's rapt audience listening intently as he blended oral history and myth.

Innumerable nights just like this lie buried in the ancestral memory of every human being on Earth -- the starlit sky, the comforting fire, the storyteller. So we lived and learned and passed along the painstakingly acquired store of lore and knowledge for all but the briefest fraction of human history -- that minuscule interlude being the one we now inhabit, the time of books and television and nights washed clean of starlight by electric lamps.

After Gwin finished, Calvin Grinnell, a cultural development specialist for the Three Affiliated Tribes, used the moment to remind his visitors that history belongs not only to those who write it down but to those who live and remember it.

Amy Mossett, tourism director for the Three Affiliated Tribes and chairwoman of the Circle of Tribal Advisors for the National Council of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial, dons a buckskin dress for a presentation about Sacagawea. The bicentennial, she says, offers tribes a chance to present their view of the Lewis and Clark story.

"We have our own stories about Sakakawea, Lewis and Clark," he said, using the preferred Hidatsa pronunciation of the Indian woman's name. "And as you have seen tonight, we are quite capable of telling them. We don't need anyone's help."

We emerged reluctantly into the cold night air and returned to the visitor center, where we were entertained by fiddle and guitar music courtesy of Eddie "King" Johnson, Sandy Poitra and Johnson's son, Brian, from the Turtle Mountain band of Chippewa. The musicians are metis, descendents of French trappers and traders who took native women as wives, and their music had an almost Cajun feel to it -- infectious, bouncy, with a dark, rich undercurrent like roux in a pot of gumbo. Most of our group proved susceptible to its urgings, and began dancing.

Winter darkness settled over the visitor center like a heavy cloak. Warm and softly lit, the circular room was an oasis of life and exuberance in the vast Plains night, illustrating how fortunate the Corps of Discovery was to have musicians among its members -- and illustrating, too, the ability of stories, music and dance to banish boredom and loneliness, to forge a sense of fellowship even among strangers from widely divergent backgrounds. For our group, it was a pleasant fillip appended to the weekend; for those who passed this way 200 years ago, it would have been a matter of emotional survival.

Night without end

As the musicians put away their instruments, we boarded the vans again and drove back to Fort Mandan, where we crowded into the visitor center for tips about staying warm during the night from guides at Voyageur Outward Bound in Minnesota, who lead winter skiing and dogsledding trips. Because it was a clear, still night, they invited those who were so inclined to move their sleeping bags out of the tents onto ground cloths in the open, under the stars.

Most of us did. There was a lot of stomping around in the snow and flapping of plastic as people tried to find a comfortably flat location. Crashing and muffled curses accompanied last-minute trips to the distant outhouse. I fluffed out my down bag, laid it on top of a thin foam pad, stripped off my heavy boots and fleece pants, and slid into the bag. Following our guides' tips, I swapped sweaty socks for a dry, fresh pair, pulled off my jacket and cinched the hood of the mummy bag around my head until just my nose, mouth and eyes were exposed. I kept my fleece hat on my head.

The temperature by this time was well below freezing. Across the clearing, Fort Mandan's log walls were visible, illuminated by brilliant starlight reflecting off the snow. Just outside the fort's front gate, a pair of candle lanterns cast a weak orange glow.

I watched the sky for a while, and then closed my eyes, hoping for sleep. I dozed but soon awakened. My nose was cold. So were my feet. I dug into my pack and pulled out another pair of socks. It helped at first, and I dozed again. But I soon reawakened. Snow is surprisingly lumpy and hard to lie on, for a substance that seems so soft in the hand.

The air temperature continued to drop. Eventually, I grew so cold I pulled on my fleece pants and sweater, and added a balaclava to my ensemble, covering every bit of my head except my nose and eyes.

I also pulled my head inside my bag. On a long trip, this would be a bad idea, since my breath would condense inside the bag and make the insulation soggy after a few nights. But I knew I would be sleeping out for only one night, and my nose could not tolerate the sub-freezing air. My feet eventually grew so cold they began to ache, with the exception of several toes, which had lost all feeling.

The night passed with excruciating slowness. I watched the Big Dipper rotate around Polaris, the North Star, and saw meteors streak the sky. Several times, coyotes began howling, filling the cold air with a wild chorus. Down by the river, geese woke up and begin honking. It almost sounded as if coyotes were rousting the geese and chasing them around on the river bank.

With the first hint of light, well before daybreak, we were up and brushing ice off our bags, pulling on stiff boots. The water in a bottle I had tucked inside the bag with me had frozen up from the bottom, where it rested on the ground, until it was half ice. A weird fog had settled over the encampment, turning the cottonwoods into dim, ghostly figures. We hurriedly packed our gear and raced for the visitor center, where hot coffee and breakfast awaited. It was four hours before my feet stopped hurting and my toes regained sensation.

The Corps of Discovery spent 146 nights at Fort Mandan during the winter of 1804-05, and many of those nights were much, much colder than the barely sub-zero temperature we endured -- sometimes as much as 40 below, or "72 degrees below the freezing point" as William Clark helpfully noted in his journal.

Of course, the explorers weren't foolhardy enough to sleep out on the snow the way our group did; they slept indoors on bunks next to fireplaces. Still, they sometimes suffered frostbite while standing sentry or hunting, as did the natives.

"The Indians of the lower Village turned out to hunt for a man & a boy who had not returned from the hunt of yesterday, and borrow'd a Slay to bring them in expecting to find them frosed to death," Clark wrote in his journal on Jan. 10, 1805.

"About 10 oClock the boy about 13 years of age Came to the fort with his feet frosed and had laid out last night without fire with only a Buffalow Robe to Cover him ... Soon after the arrival of the Boy, a Man came in who had also stayed out without fire, and verry thinly Clothed, this man was not the least injured. Customs & the habits of those people has anured them to bare more cold than I thought it possible for man to endure."

As we drove away, basking in the warm air blasting from the heater vents, we could see the frozen Missouri winding through the stark landscape, a gleaming serpent stilled by winter.

I knew that I would be back several months later, when the serpent had reawakened, and that I would follow it westward. Montana, and the mountains for which it was named, beckoned.