A thriving fur trade post between 1830 and 1860, Fort Clark, in what is today western North Dakota, also served as a way station for artists, scientists, missionaries, soldiers, and other western chroniclers traveling along the Upper Missouri River. The written and visual legacies of these visitors - among them the German prince-explorer Maximilian of Wied, Swiss artist Karl Bodmer, and American painter-author George Catlin - have long been the primary sources of information on the cultures of the Mandan and Hidatsa Indians, the peoples who met the first fur traders in the area. This book, by a team of anthropologists, is the first thorough account of the fur trade at Fort Clark to integrate new archaeological evidence with the historical record. The Mandans built a village in about 1822 near the site of what would become Fort Clark; after the 1837 smallpox epidemic that decimated them, the village was occupied by Arikaras until they abandoned it in 1862. Because it has never been plowed, the site of Fort Clark and the adjacent Mandan/Arikara village are rich in archaeological information. The authors describe the environmental and cultural setting of the fort (named after William Clark of the Lewis and Clark expedition), including the social profile of the fur traders who lived there. They also chronicle the histories of the Mandans and the Arikaras before and during the occupation of the post and the village. The authors conclude by assessing the results - published here for the first time - of the archaeological program that investigated the fort and adjacent Indian villages at Fort Clark State Historic Site. By vividly depicting the conflict and cooperation in and around the fort, this book reveals the various cultures' interdependence.

"To follow the journeys made by Mackay and Evans up the Missouri and across the plains in 1795-97 is to begin to appreciate the kind of world Lewis and Clark found when they voyaged up the river in 1804. . . . Of all those waterways, none has captured the American imagination more than the Missouri. . . . It is a river of promise, of dreams, and of dreams denied." -James P. Ronda, from the Foreword

When Mackay and Evans returned to Spanish St. Louis in 1797, they were hailed as "the two most illustrious travelers in the northern parts of this continent." Ironically, though the findings of Mackay and Evans were responsible for much of the early success of Lewis and Clark in their expedition, the adulation that followed Lewis and Clark's successful return completely eclipsed Mackay and Evans's reputations. In Prologue to Lewis and Clark, W. Raymond Wood narrates the history of this long-forgotten but important expedition up the Missouri River.

The Mackay and Evans expedition was more than an exploratory mission. It was the last effort by Spain to gain control over the Missouri River basin in the decade before the United States purchased the Louisiana territory. In that respect, it failed. But the expedition was successful as a journey of exploration. The maps and documents they created later provided the Lewis and Clark expedition with invaluable information for its first full year.

Consolidating a collection of eighteen contemporary documents relating to the Mackay and Evans expedition as well as his own research and analysis, Wood provides an in-depth examination of the expedition's background, execution, and final results.

"Volume 79 in the American Exploration and Travel Series"

Long before their first contact with whites, the Mandan and Hidatsa villagers along the Missouri River in what is now central North Dakota had established a prosperous center for a vast intertribal trade network across the Northern Plains. Early white fur traders, learning of the existence of these villages, were quickly drawn to them.French, British, and Canadian traders were the first to arrive. Representatives of the Montreal-based North West Company were soon followed to the Missouri by employees of the rival Hudson's Bay Company, and for nearly thirty years the two groups competed for the beaver pelts collected by the Mandans and Hidatsas from tribes farther west. Contact with the Canadian traders, and later with others who ascended the Missouri from Saint Louis, had a profound effect on the tribes, for it introduced Euro-American culture and trade goods that led to the extinction of their way of life. There is especially good documentation of the dealings between the Mandans and Hidatsas and the whites for the period 1790 to 1806, when several literate traders visited the Indian villages and recorded their experiences and impressions in lively, colorful narratives. In this book are presented new, dependable, annotated transcriptions of five of the most important of these documents, the narratives of the traders John Macdonell, David Thompson, Francois-Antoine Larocque (two journals), and Charles McKenzie. Through the narratives and the editors' own thorough historical introduction, W. Raymond Wood and Thomas D. Thiessen reexamine the history of the fur trade in the North and provide fresh insight into that shadowy period. New maps show in detail the routes of the trader-narrators, and the appendix provides useful statistics, inventories, and financial accounts of the fur trade of the era. Early Fur Trade on the Northern Plains will be of use not only to scholars of the fur trade and anthropologists but also to all those interested in the exploration and early history of the vast Northern Plains.

Less than thirty years after Lewis and Clark completed their epic journey, Prince Maximilian of Wied--a German naturalist--and his entourage set off on their own daring expedition across North America. Accompanying the prince on this 1832-34 voyage was Swiss artist Karl Bodmer, whose drawings and watercolors--designed to illustrate Maximilian's journals--now rank among the great treasures of nineteenth-century American art. This lavishly illustrated book juxtaposes Bodmer's landscape images with modern-day photographs of the same views, allowing readers to see what has changed, and what seems unchanged, since the time Maximilian and Bodmer made their storied trip up the Missouri River.

To discover how the areas Bodmer depicted have changed over time, photographer Robert M. Lindholm and anthropologist W. Raymond Wood made several trips over a period of years, from 1985 to 2002, to locate and record the same sites--all the way from Boston Harbor, where Maximilian and Bodmer began their journey, to Fort McKenzie, in modern-day western Montana. Pairing sixty-seven Bodmer works side by side with Lindholm's photographs of the same sites, this volume uses the comparison of old and new images to reveal alterations through time--and the encroachment of a built environment--across diverse landscapes.

"Karl Bodmer's America""Revisited" is at once a tribute to the artistic achievements of a premier landscape artist and a photographer who followed in his footsteps, and a valuable record of America's ever-changing environment.

"Few geographic locations in the West exhibit a greater concentration of sites of . . . historic fur- and Indian-trade establishments, or one covering a longer time span, than that of the junction of the Bad and the Missouri Rivers." - G. Hubert Smith No other part of the West saw such a succession of trading posts as did the heart of modern-day South Dakota, where the Bad River meets the Missouri near the contemporary town of Fort Pierre. Various firms established posts here starting in 1817. Two of these posts, Fort Tecumseh (1822) and Fort Pierre Chouteau (1832), reached their golden age under the American Fur Company in the 1830s and 1840s. While company employees recorded daily activities in journals, they relayed company business as well as personal information about the individuals at the post in letter books. Letter books, which contained copies of all outgoing correspondence, were once common items at all posts on the upper Missouri, but only a few survive today. Those that do vividly illustrate the nature of commerce on the Northern Great Plains during the first half of the nineteenth century. Editors Michael M. Casler and W. Raymond Wood transcribed and annotated these rare documents, including some translated from the original French. Known for over a century, the Fort Tecumseh journal and the letter books from Fort Tecumseh and Fort Pierre Chouteau are published here in their entirety for the first time.