Day 7: Bismarck ND - Williston ND

If this post is briefer than you might've hoped, it's because this pikey motel room has a desk but no chair so I'm sitting on the bed with my laptop on the bedside table, which is fucking uncomfortable.

Bismarck, as befits the State Capital of North Dakota, has a State Capitol and outside it is a statue:

Although Sacagawea almost certainly died in 1812 and was thus, unlike Dignity, never photographed, the sculptor based her face on a known descendant so it probably ent a bad likeness.  If only the highways people hadn't been indulging in major 'ole-digging around the I-94 junction...

...then I could have got to New Salem a whole lot quicker.  New Salem has nothing to do with Lewis and Clark but it does have Salem Sue:

She is apparently the world's largest Holstein and frankly I'm surprised that she hasn't been blown up by a raiding party from Wisconsin yet.  This detour is the fault of Danny Guthrie, who passed this way on one of his X-country perambulations a month or two back.  Then it was a retraced bac east along I-94 to Fort Abraham Lincoln in Mandan.  As the name suggests, it was built a Several of decades after the Expedition, tough they did make camp in da hood on both legss of the trip.  It was, however, the lair of celebrated military berk George Armstrong Custer before he went off chasing the Sioux and paying a heavy price for it.

Custer's Last House

There's a nice little museum in the Visitor Center too, though the one at the Interpretive Center a few miles up the road in Washburn is better coz that's nearly all L&C-related.

Hold on! Marge Gunderson? Yaaa!

Lewis versus BEAR

Entry to the museum also gives you entry to the reconstructed Fort Mandan a few miles down the road and right on the river.  The Mandan were one of the local tribes and were already well-known to French and BRITISH traders operating up the Missouri and out of Canada, hence the area was widely regarded as the final frontier of civilisation.  Nevertheless, Fort Mandan, where the expedition spent the winter of 1804-05, was built on the opposite side of the river from the Mandan villages, albeit that this was a lot less of an issue once the river had frozen over.  The proximity was beneficial to both sides since the services of the blacksmith could be traded with the Mandan for food, while Whitey's guns mad hunting bison a lot easier.  Even though the keelboat and a fair few men turned round and hared off downriver at this point, the Fort was not large and was all in all probably a pretty grim place to spend a North Dakota winter.  I expect Seaman was OK, though.

Fort Mandan exterior

Fortunately the gnu was never used

"a dogg of the newfoundland breed"
Seaman has his own overlook on the river bank

North of here is coal-mining country, at least until you get past the Garrison Dam, which holds back the enormous Lake Sakakawea.

Four Bears Memorial Bridge from Crow Flies High overlook

The two main men took different routes on the way back east; Lewis went off to the north to explore the Marias River while Clark cut straight east into the valley of the Yellowstone River, which he followed all the way down to the confluence with the Missouri.  The two parts were reunited not far south of that there bridge, possibly because a buckskin-clad Lewis had been shot in the leg not long before by a near-sighted soldier who mistook him for an elk while the pair were out hunting.

After which point it's gazillions of nodding donkeys pumping oil all the way to Williston.  Tomorrow's entry may be even more concise because, although it's a long way to Great Falls there's not much to see on the way because yet more dams and accompanying lakes.