Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site

June 19, 2024

Before our adventures ran afoul of the weather, we had the privilege of stopping by Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site . It is located along the Knife River that feeds into the Missouri. Five villages comprising two people groups, the Mandan and Hidasta, lived here. Prior to the small pox winter of 1837/38 which destroyed these people as well as the culling of the buffalo herds, there were over 50 lodges in each village which could house between 10-30 people meaning the population of the five villages was 2,500 - 7,500 people. These villages were quite close. We walked past the ruins of two of the villages in less than a mile.
This village is where Lewis and Clark hired their interpreter Touissant Charbonneau and one of his wives Sakakawea to help the party as they traveled west to map out what the United States had acquired with the Louisiana Purchase*. You may be thinking but wait, Sakakawea was Shoshone and you would be correct. She was taken in a raid by the Hidatsa when she was ten and sold to Charbonneau as his wife at age thirteen. This part about Sakakawea was really neat considering all of the Lewis and Clark related history we grew up with.

* As we were leaving Shelby, we came upon a historic site by the name of Camp Disappointment. The camp was the northernmost camp of the Lewis and Clark Expedition and so named because they discovered that unfortunately the Missouri River drainage did not reach the 50th parallel as hoped.

This is a replica of a smaller summer lodge in the village. This one is about 30 feet across while the ones in the village measure up to 50 or 60 feet across. They had winter lodges that were smaller and a few miles away behind trees to break the cold winter wind. These lodges were expected to last about ten years.