June 17 - Fort Lincoln, North Dakota

Although we hated to leave Valley City just before the weekend celebration of "Rally In The Valley" that would have dancing on Main street (literally) plus other attractions, Terry was already driving down from Moosomin, Saskatchewan and we wanted to meet him in Bismarck, North Dakota. So we hitched up the trailer and headed west on I-94 to Bismarck. The landscape was definitely a Great Plains landscape, but I was surprised by the number of lakes we saw along the way; it was almost like Wisconsin and I had always thought of the Great Plains as dry and dusty. Perhaps I've been influenced by my early experiences in Oklahoma and Texas where the Plains were quite dry and dusty, and over-generalized that experience. In North Dakota the fields were green and the lakes looked full although the radio had an item about a three-year drought that had lowered the level of the Army Corps of Engineer artificial lakes quite a bit.

We drove through Bismarck across the Missouri River to Mandan and turned south about 8 miles to the Fort Abraham Lincoln State Park. We were really just looking for a convenient campsite to do the Bismarck Volksmarch, but we found that this state park was also the site of the old cavalry fort from which Custer had ridden out to the battle of the Little Big Horn. Who knew? It also included an old restored Mandan village and museum. Wow, what unexpected riches! We found Terry in site 35 and parked our trailer next door in site 36.

We didn't have enough time to drive in to Bismarck for the walk that day because we first had to talk nonstop for a couple of hours to catch up on what was happening in all of our lives. So we finished up the afternoon by just walking over to the reconstructed Custer house at the site of the old fort. The $5 entry fee for the fort included a tour of the house plus some reconstructed barracks and a "Commissary" gift shop. The Custer house included all features of the original house plus what looked to me to be a complete set of period furniture, but I don't know exactly how much of it was really Custer's and how much was simply period furnishings or reconstruction. Nevertheless it was very impressive and an accurate depiction, I think, of how the post commanders lived at that period on the frontier forts, which is to say, quite well indeed if they had enough money for servants and luxurious furnishings.

The downstairs rooms were the formal parlor or living room, dining area, and kitchen in the back plus the Custers' bedroom and a den on the other side. The den featured a very large complimentary portrait of, you guessed it, Custer himself! Somehow I didn't get the impression that he was exactly the self-effacing type. The upstairs rooms included more modest servant and guest bedrooms, the latter featuring a genuine Victorian fainting couch for the ladies! The final room upstairs was constructed by knocking out the wall between two bedrooms and was used as an unofficial club for the post officers; it contained a full sized pool table and reading nook with a card table.

Custer's attitude toward his men was indicated by the fact that he sent Privates into the house while it was burning down to save his wife's furniture! In fact, the rocker that was in his wife Libby's room had partially burned rockers as a result of that fire, although she obviously felt it was still good enough to be used. Custer also kept a captured cougar on a chain in the basement pantry that at one point attacked their cook! On the plus side, Custer wrote his wife love letters of up to 40 or even 60 pages long, and it would have been interesting to see what those letters revealed about the man and his thinking. We asked about it at the Commissary, but it turned out that the book containing reprints of those letters is now out of print, which is a shame.

The barracks rooms were also quite authentically done. I particularly enjoyed the capsule biographies of each soldier that were placed at the foot of the bunks. The percentage killed at the battle of the Little Big Horn was very high indeed, but I was also interested in the variety of occupations the soldiers had practiced before entering the military. Occupations ranged from schoolteacher and bank clerk to unskilled laborer, boatman, painter, and the like. I was surprised that pensions were not only given to the surviving widows or children of soldiers killed in battle but also to the parents of the soldier, if any.

We ended up our visit to the fort by chatting with a re-enactor living in one of the tents pitched on the parade ground. Actually he invited us to a cup of coffee and discussed the trapdoor action Springfield rifle used by the infantry with Terry and the terms of enlistment and living conditions with Monika and me. He was a jolly soul and very enthusiastic about bringing this period of our country's history to life. Later that evening we looked at each other's photo albums and talked some more before turning in for the night.