Fort Mandan: The Winter That Shaped the Expedition

On November second, eighteen oh four, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark ordered their Corps of Discovery to stop and build a fort. They were roughly fifty miles north of what is now Bismarck, near the great Mandan and Hidatsa villages at the Knife River. They would stay the winter.

The fort they built from cottonwood logs was triangular in shape, with palisade walls eighteen feet high and a swivel gun mounted to cover the Missouri River approach. They called it Fort Mandan, and it was completed by November twenty-seventh. Outside, temperatures dropped to forty-five degrees below zero. Inside, the men made moccasins, cured meat, and forged iron battle axes to trade for corn from the nearby villages.

During that winter Lewis and Clark made a decision that would define the rest of the journey. A French Canadian fur trader named Toussaint Charbonneau presented himself as an interpreter. He brought with him his young Shoshone wife, a woman the Hidatsa had seized in a raid years earlier and sold at gambling. Her name was Sakakawea. They hired Charbonneau primarily because of her: the captains knew they would need to negotiate with Shoshone people for horses to cross the Rocky Mountains.

On February eleventh, eighteen oh five, Sakakawea gave birth to a son, Jean Baptiste, inside the fort. He was about two months old when the expedition departed on April seventh. Lewis wrote in his journal that day: the expedition had reembarked and was proceeding on, into a country at least two thousand miles in width on which the foot of civilized man had never trodden.

Charbonneau was eventually paid about five hundred dollars, plus a horse and a lodge, for his services. Sakakawea received nothing. She was about eighteen when the expedition ended.