Missouri Valley Environs

Fort Clark and its opposition post Primeau's Post, along with the nearby Mandan and later Arikara village, served defensive purposes and helped tap the bountiful natural resources of this stretch of the Missouri River valley. Between 1832 and 1862, many visitors commented on Fort Clark and its surroundings. In the summer of 1832, artist George Catlin wrote that the ground on which the Mandan village was built was admirably selected for defense, on a bank forty or fifty feet above the bed of the river. On June 18, 1833, after his party's arrival, Prince Maximilian wrote that immediately behind the fort in the prairies were seventy leather tents of the Crows, and that the view of the prairie around Fort Clark was highly interesting. In his journal entry for June 7, 1843, naturalist John James Audubon wrote that the site of the fort appeared a good one, though it was placed considerably below the Mandan village, and that small cultivated spots grew corn, pumpkins, and beans, while the fort and village stood on a high bank rising somewhat to the elevation of a hill. On June 4, 1862, after Fort Clark had been abandoned, pioneer ethnologist Lewis Henry Morgan went ashore there and wrote that the ruins of the village were quite interesting and that the dirt houses of the Upper Missouri far surpassed his expectations.

North Dakota · United States