Double Ditch: Three Hundred Years on the Bluff

Seven and a half miles north of Bismarck, a wide grassy bluff above the Missouri River holds one of the most significant archaeological sites in the Northern Plains. Double Ditch Indian Village was occupied by the Mandan for nearly three hundred years, from approximately fourteen ninety to seventeen eighty-five.

The site takes its name from the two defensive ditches that still ring the village, once backed by timber palisade walls. At its peak the village held dozens of earth lodges and was one of several Mandan communities that together housed a population of perhaps ten thousand people.

When Lewis and Clark passed in eighteen oh four, the village had already been abandoned for roughly two decades. The smallpox epidemic of the early seventeen eighties had ended it. The great earthen depressions of the lodge floors are still visible today, pressed into the bluff like the shadows of a civilization.