Fort Clark State Historic Site

Fort Clark is the village the steamboat killed — the Mandan earthlodge town of Mitu'tahakto's, built on the Missouri bluffs in 1822, where the women grew corn and beans and the men hunted bison, and where the American Fur Company planted its trading post in 1830. Francis Chardon's journal kept the record: the painters Catlin and Bodmer came through, the trade ran, and then on June 19, 1837, the steamboat St. Peters docked with smallpox aboard.

The epidemic took ninety percent of the Mandan in two months. The survivors abandoned the village in August and joined the Hidatsa upriver; the Arikara — themselves halved by the same plague — moved into the empty lodges in 1838 and held the site until cholera and pressure drove them out in 1861. The unplowed ground keeps everything: eighty-six lodge depressions, two trading posts, the fortification ditch, the cemetery, and the garden plots where a civilization ended in a single summer.

The file keeps Fort Clark: the Mandan village, the fur post, the St. Peters, and the ninety percent — the fur trade's most complete archaeological record and its most documented catastrophe.

Fort Clark is the archive's epidemic file — the earthlodges, the steamboat, and the village that the smallpox emptied.