Bismarck and Mandan: The Heart of a Continent

You are standing at the geographic and historical center of North America. The Missouri River runs through here, the longest river on the continent, and for ten thousand years this crossing point has been where civilizations met, traded, and conflicted.

The Mandan people built fortified earth-lodge cities near the Heart River confluence, farming corn and beans and trading with nations from the Gulf Coast to Canada. The Hidatsa held villages to the north. The Arikara pressed up from the south. Together they built the most sophisticated trading network on the Northern Plains, and it was here that Lewis and Clark wintered in eighteen oh four and hired the interpreter who made the rest of their journey possible.

Then came the railroad. The Northern Pacific arrived in eighteen seventy-two and staked out a town it called Bismarck, named for a German chancellor to attract investment. The town grew into a rough frontier commercial hub, then, through a combination of bribery and political maneuvering by the Northern Pacific's agent Alexander McKenzie, became the territorial capital in eighteen eighty-three and the state capital when North Dakota entered the union in eighteen eighty-nine.

The North Dakota State Capitol, the Art Deco skyscraper you can see rising from the prairie, replaced an earlier building that burned on December twenty-eighth, nineteen thirty. The replacement, completed in nineteen thirty-four during the depths of the Depression, is nineteen stories tall and still the tallest building in the state.

Bismarck and Mandan sit across the river from each other, two cities joined by a bridge at the same crossing that has always mattered. The Mandan built here first, for reasons that every subsequent civilization repeated: the river made you powerful, and this is where you could cross it.