June 18 - Bismarck, North Dakota

We had a combined breakfast using Terry's egg-foaming machine plus his coffee maker together with our skillet for making pancakes. Then we drove over to the Visitor Center in Bismarck to sign up for our walk. The center had a room of exhibits that featured a large scale model of the steamship Far West which had served on the upper Missouri River for many years in the mid 1800s. The Captain of the Far West named Marsh had trained Mark Twain as a cub pilot on the Mississippi before the Civil War. Marsh was also responsible for carrying many of the wounded from the battle of the Little Big Horn back downstream for treatment, a trip he made at a record setting pace.

The Bismarck walk featured a nice neighborhood of older houses and a quite plain Capitol building. But next to the Capitol was the State Library that had free internet connections and I interrupted our walk briefly to sign on to the internet and answer our email. We finished up the walk with a really nice lunch at a Cracker Barrel across the street from the Visitor Center, and then drove back to Fort Abraham Lincoln.

We spent the afternoon touring the reconstructed Mandan village plus a small museum that was located just up the hill from the campground. The Mandans, encountered by Lewis and Clark in 1803, were a settled agricultural tribe who farmed the river bottomland between the banks of the Missouri. Until they were decimated by smallpox and competition with the nomadic tribes, the Mandans were successful traders and farmers of squash, beans, and corn. Their lodges were constructed of cottonwood tree trunks assembled largely by the women, as it was a matriarchal type of society. The men, as true for many tribes, were primarily hunters and warriors.

As the day ended we returned to camp for dinner, after which we had a musical jam session. Terry played his banjo, Monika played the dulcimer, and I played the recorder. That might, of course, just be an ear-splitting cacophony, but we took turns so that it didn’t sound too bad. As dusk fell we repaired to the reconstructed Granary building of the old fort to see an evening play. As we walked over we saw some deer gamboling across the greensward in front of the Custer house., a pretty sight.

Included in our park entrance fee were two one-act plays, in fact, and the granary was the venue for this event. The thespian program included a play followed by an intermission with live music and then a second play. The audience was families with children and the plays were both melodramas. The amateur players acted very broadly, which was appealing to the kiddies, and the musical interlude included banjo, violin, and piano selections. All in all, we had a lot of fun and a lot of laughs, but if you want to see these thespians in action, be sure to schedule your visit for Thursday, Friday, or Saturday nights during the summer because those are the only times these performances are given. It was a great way to round out the evening, and afterwards we just chatted for a bit with the performers before we returned to camp for the night in our respective campers.