Fort Mandan, Winter 1804 to 1805: The Cosmopolitan Center of the Continent

Lewis and Clark arrived at the earthlodge villages of the Mandan and Hidatsa nations in November of eighteen oh four convinced they were entering the frontier. What they found was a trade network.

The Mandan had been receiving French, British, and Spanish manufactured goods through Indigenous trading networks for more than a century before the Corps of Discovery's canoes came around the bend. Their villages on the Upper Missouri were the economic and diplomatic center of the Northern Plains, a market town where bison hunters from the western grasslands came to trade for corn and dried squash, and where European traders came from the east carrying the goods that moved through chains of exchange stretching to Hudson Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. When Lewis and Clark wintered there, they were the newest arrivals at a place that had been receiving strangers and assessing them for a hundred years.

They built Fort Mandan and stayed through April of eighteen oh five. It was there they hired Toussaint Charbonneau, a French Canadian fur trader, as an interpreter, and through him recruited his wife, a Shoshone-speaking woman named Sacajawea, who had been captured from her people by the Hidatsa as a child and was living in the village. The captains needed someone who could speak Shoshone, because they planned to obtain horses from the Shoshone for the mountain crossing ahead.

The Corps called the Mandan villages the most cosmopolitan place they had encountered west of Saint Louis. The Mandan had already known that for generations.