Mandan — North Dakota | Shared Latitude

Bismarck's quieter twin across the Missouri River, where a reconstructed earthlodge village tells a much older story than the state capital ever will. Lia and I crossed the river for an afternoon and ended up watching the sun set over Fort Abraham Lincoln from a bluff we practically had to ourselves.

Everyone talks about Bismarck, but Mandan, sitting directly across the Missouri, is where I’d send anyone actually curious about this stretch of river’s older history. Named for the Mandan people whose earthlodge villages once lined these bluffs, the town of about twenty-three thousand keeps a slower, more residential pace than its capital-city neighbor, and Lia and I found ourselves preferring it almost immediately — fewer government buildings, more front porches, a downtown that still runs on hardware stores and diners rather than lobbyist lunches.

Fort Abraham Lincoln and On-A-Slant Village

South of town, Fort Abraham Lincoln State Park layers two very different histories on the same bluff: a reconstructed On-A-Slant Mandan earthlodge village, occupied from roughly 1575 until smallpox devastated the tribe in the 1780s, and the reconstructed 1870s cavalry post from which George Custer rode out toward the Little Bighorn. We ducked into one of the rebuilt earthlodges, cool and dim inside with a smoke hole letting in a single shaft of light, and our guide explained how as many as fifteen people might have lived in a single lodge like it, storing corn in underground caches that archaeologists are still mapping. Afterward we climbed to Custer’s reconstructed house higher on the bluff, its Victorian furnishings an odd, jarring contrast to the earthlodges just below.

A reconstructed earthlodge dwelling at On-A-Slant Village in Fort Abraham Lincoln State Park near Mandan, North Dakota

The bluffs at dusk

We stayed in the park until the light went gold, walking a bluff-top trail above the Missouri as the river below turned the color of hammered copper. A few white-tailed deer worked the tree line, and Lia pointed out how the whole valley — river, cottonwoods, the earthlodge roofs below us — looked essentially unchanged from what a Mandan family would have seen four hundred years ago, minus the state capitol dome visible across the water in Bismarck.

The Missouri River valley bathed in golden evening light near Mandan, North Dakota

Getting There

Bismarck Municipal Airport (BIS) sits just across the river, about fifteen minutes from downtown Mandan. A car is the only practical way to reach Fort Abraham Lincoln State Park, roughly seven miles south of town on ND-1806.