Beemer Boys Motorcycle Trips: 2021-08-12-Thursday-Mandan ND to Williston ND-240 miles

Mandan Village day! (And then go get beat up by the wind day..).

Dave picked a great hotel in Mandan last night and the built in restaurant was good enough to not leave the hotel.

We think the actual Mandan village is not in Mandan, but 40 miles north. There is a Lincoln State Park that has some kind of reconstruction, but we opted for the real deal (we hope).

Very little traffic going north on 83, and we found the Mandan village which is an interpretive center with a lot of artifacts, maps, journals, buffalo heads, etc. It brought to our attention that another guy, Prince Maximilian. He traveled after Lewis & Clark and captured the Native American culture just as it was being destroyed by the huge movement of Europeans in the early to mid 1800's. Beautiful paintings and a highly regarded book.

This makes you realize the breathtaking rate that the US was changing in this period.

The fort was reproduced a couple miles away right on the river bank (the current river bank since the river has moved all over in the last 200 years). The actual fort remnants they think is under the current river bed.

I always think forts are going to be big Hollywood set type things, but this one was built just big enough to house the 40 men and have a blacksmith shop and a storage room with walls all the way around and gates you can close. So pretty small, made out of cottonwood with a chimney and 2 rooms for about 8 enlisted men men, and a couple rooms for the officers and interpreter.

They burned cottonwood for heat and cooking and the temperatures were recorded down to 40 below zero.

Interpretation was fascinating. Lewis & Clark spoke English, The French trapper, Sacajawea's husband, translated to French, Sacajawea translated to Shoshone which was a common language for Native Americans, and they usually hired someone in the tribe that spoke the local language and Shoshone. Wow. There is also a sign language the Native Americans used for trading that was universal so that was used some times, but it was a trading language so not too useful for diplomacy.

Then on our way north west and the wind was already really bad. We got the crap knocked out of us all afternoon by the wind. We ended up slowing down to 50 which helped somewhat. Sometimes it hit us head on and sometimes from the side which was hard because your bike ends up weaving back and forth in the road. Really annoying, and really tiring.

We took a couple roadside breaks but other than that we kept at it. On the plus side, the temperature never got above 80 all day, which was a nice break from the previous hot days. Dave said he would rather do the hot thing than the wind thing.

As we approached Williston the oil wells started which is what I remember from a previous trip. And we saw wheat fields being harvested by those giant combines. That's a lot of Wheaties!!