Fort Clark Trading Post Historic Site
Backstory and Context
The history of Fort Clark Trading Post begins in the summer of 1822 when the Mandan built a village of earth-covered homes on the west bluffs of the Missouri River at the Clark's and Chardon Creek crossing. The community overlooked gardens tended by village women who grew crops of corn, beans, squash, pumpkins, and sunflowers. Tobacco was the only crop the Mandan men maintained, as they were primarily responsible for hunting buffalo and other game. After the fall harvest, the natives moved to a winter village sheltered in the wooded Missouri River bottom. With the revitalization of spring each year, the tribe returned to plant crops, hunt game, and trade fur and commodities at Fort Clark.
The birth of Fort Clark came in 1830-1831, when James Kipp, an employee of American Fur Company, built the trading post south of the Mandan village in hopes of enhancing trade with the natives. The rectangular fort measured 120 feet by 160 feet and was protected by a palisade. Inside the fort a conventional house was constructed and occupied by the head trader Francis A. Chardon. Between 1834 and 1839, Chardon kept a journal of his life at Fort Clark, which records the avid trade and tragic history of this North Dakota Historic Site.
The first steamboat to journey to the Upper Missouri, the Yellow Stone, arrived at Fort Clark in 1832 and delivered 1,500 gallons of liquor and a variety of trade goods. It returned to St. Louis carrying 100 packs of beaver pelts and bison robes from the fort. Although steamboat traffic was important in transporting goods and visitors to the site, it also brought disease. On June 19, 1837, the steamboat St. Peters docked at Fort Clark carrying passengers infected with smallpox. Soon the disease swept through the Mandan village, killing about 90 percent of the inhabitants. In mid-August, at the height of the smallpox epidemic, the survivors fled to join the Hidatsa near the mouth of the Knife River, abandoning the village at Fort Clark.
Although also devastated by the 1837 epidemic, many of the Mandans' neighbors, the Arikara, survived. In 1838 they moved into the abandoned Mandan village to trade at Fort Clark and to grow their crops. Tragically, an outbreak of cholera in 1851 and another of smallpox in 1856 further reduced their population. The Arikara used the village as their summer home near the local trade-hub until they moved to Star Village near Fort Berthold in 1862.
Fort Clark Historic Site. The Historical Marker Database. Accessed February 03, 2018. https://www.hmdb.org/marker.asp?marker=33313. The Historical Marker Database
Morris, Michael A. Expansion and Empire. Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual History. Accessed February 27, 2018. url=https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/galeacih/expansion_and_empire/0?institutionId=3309.
Fort Clark Historic Site. City of Washburn, North Dakota. Accessed February 27, 2018. http://www.washburnnd.com/index.asp?Type=B_BASIC&SEC=%7BC166C414-DD9C-4FE8-BD24-59C0E74D588E%7D.