Dakota Jackpot !

For days and days I've searched for information on the history of North Dakota.  I've picked up some pieces and parts here and there.  I even searched for a book store here in Grand Forks.  I found a used book store in the mall (of all places) and the University of North Dakota campus bookstore.  Not much I could use in either place.  But today, today I hit the mother lode.  It's a awesome website: ndstudies.org.  It tells me the things I want to know - and me want more! 

I already told you that Varennes was the first white trader into the area. Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, Sieur de la Verendrye (1685 - 1749) was given all of the fur trade west of Montreal by the King of France. By 1738 he had reached the Mandan and Hidatsa villages on the Missouri river in what is now North Dakota. That was thirty years before the American Revolution!  The fur companies required their people to keep detailed records, so we have our first documentation of the tribes.  Can you imagine being born in the 1600's in France and ending up in the American West?!

Geographer David Thompson (1770 - 1857)  (that's from before the American Revolution to after the Civil War!  What a phenomenal time to live!!)  Thompson was the first to map the huge lands southwest of Hudson's Bay.  He began in 1797 when he was twenty-seven years old.  He became known as "the greatest practical land geographer of all time" because he not only drew maps but he kept journals, too.  Those journals weren't found until years after his death - and not published until after the turn of the century - 1916.  Mmm-mmm-mmm, how I'd like a copy of that!

Alexander Henry set up a permanent trading post at Pembina (which is two miles south of what is now the U.S.-Canadian border, and it exists to this day!) in 1801.  He journaled about the Chippewa , the Red River Valley, and the Hidatsa chief, Le Borgne.

In1804 we had the Lewis and Clark Expedition.  We all know about it and it's documentation.  It's interesting how many men on that expedition could read and write, and it seems that they all kept journals.  Besides Lewis and Clark, Charles Floyd, John Ordway, Patrick Gass, Joseph Whitehouse, and Robert Frazer all kept journals, and all but Frazer's were published.  (I want copies of them, too!)

Francis A. Chardon detailed daily life at Fort Clark, an American Fur Company outpost, between 1834 and 1839, including the dying words of the Mandan Chief, Four Bears, condemning white people for the treachery of disease that came with the white man.

Then came the great American Civil War and folks began to move west in search of healing and peace and escape...