The Heart River

The Heart River flows through the southern edge of Dickinson on its way east to join the Missouri near present-day Mandan. The name Heart River appears in Lewis and Clark's journals from eighteen four when the Corps of Discovery wintered at the Mandan villages downstream. The Heart drains a watershed of roughly three thousand four hundred square miles of high-plains grassland and badlands terrain in southwestern North Dakota.

For the settlers who arrived in the eighteen eighties, it was the nearest reliable surface water, which made its valley the natural corridor for homestead claims and, later, the route the Northern Pacific chose for its grade through Stark County. The river runs low in dry years and brown with silt after heavy rains, a working river in an agricultural landscape, unremarkable unless you know it is a long-used waterway of the northern plains.