Fort Mandan: Lewis and Clark's First Winter

Just outside Washburn, North Dakota, where US-Eighty-Three meets the Missouri River corridor, the North Dakota Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center marks the site of one of the expedition's most consequential stops. In the autumn of eighteen oh four, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark led their Corps of Discovery to this stretch of the upper Missouri and built Fort Mandan, a triangular log stockade, near a cluster of Mandan Indian villages. They wintered here through eighteen oh five, one of the coldest seasons on record for the northern plains, and in the process gathered crucial geographic and cultural knowledge from the Mandan and Hidatsa peoples.

It was here that they met Toussaint Charbonneau and his Shoshone wife Sacagawea, who would guide and interpret for them on the journey west to the Pacific. The interpretive center, operated by the State Historical Society of North Dakota and opened in nineteen ninety-seven, explores the Mandan and Hidatsa farming cultures, the fur trade, and the full story of the expedition's North Dakota chapter. A reconstructed Fort Mandan stands two miles away.