June 22 - Fort Union, North Dakota

Hearing the pitter-patter of raindrops in the morning, we slept in a bit. But we came awake rather quickly when Monika looked out of the window and saw a herd of buffalo or bison grazing in the meadow just beside our campground. They were close enough that we could watch them and take pictures through the windows of our trailer, which was probably a lot safer than walking out amongst them, especially as the herd contained mothers with babies. It was fascinating watching these large (1 ton, approximately) herbivores slowly ambling along while grazing. Fortunately none of them chose our trailer to do the back scratching routine with--I saw one of them do that with a road sign and the sign definitely ended up somewhat the worse for wear! Everything ended peacefully when the main body of the herd moved on to a nearby field.

As I saw them amble slowly across a road to the field, I wondered if I could have strapped on a pair of roller skates and actually "roller skate in a buffalo herd", disproving the old 60s hit tune about that. I guesstimated that if I roller skated really slowly and avoided getting between a mother and her baby, I would have about a 50% chance of getting thru the herd without being attacked. It would all depend on how the protective old bulls would react to an admittedly very strange stimulus of a human gliding along on roller skates, and that's what made it hard to guess. Probably it would be safer to try that in the fall when the calves were grown, but given the weather in the Badlands I would then have to use cross country skis or snowshoes. So if I made it, that would change the lyrics of the old song to something like, "You can't roller skate in a buffalo herd, but you can snow shoe if you really want to!"

Anyway, after they left our area we had a quick breakfast and got rolling by shortly after nine. We had to drive very carefully out of the campground since the last mommy and baby buffaloes were still crossing the road, and we didn't want to upset anyone. How would you explain that to the insurance agent, anyway? If a bison hit your car would it be covered under collision or comprehensive? A big bull buffalo might not technically be a "vehicle", but he can easily get up to 30 mph and surely would pack the wallop of a Volkswagen if he charged us. Since I don't know the answer to these questions and didn't want to find out, I drove very slowly and cautiously.

Leaving the park, we drove north on US 83 until it was time to head west over to the border between Montana and North Dakota to get to Fort Union, a reconstructed trading post from the early 1800s. The landscape was unrelieved ranches and farms stretching from horizon to horizon except for the area where we crossed the Little Missouri River. When we descended into the river valley we were once again quite suddenly immersed in the fantastic and almost bizarre scenery of the North Dakota badlands. I was strongly tempted to turn off on the access road for the northern section of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park, but we just didn't have the time to do it.

I definitely made plans to get back to the park someday and see the northern section, visit the ruins of TR's old Elkhorn ranch, finally catch the Medora Musical, and maybe even bike the Mah Dah Hey bicycle trail which traverses the badlands for over 90 miles from the north to the south sections of the park. Folks we met who had ridden sections of the trail said some parts were quite hair raising, so I expect we should be somewhat more used to our bikes and in better bicycling shape before we take on that trail.

After we climbed up the other side of the river valley the badlands again disappeared from view and we were back in the farming/ranching area of North Dakota. To say that this area is under populated would be a gross overstatement; to paraphrase Dorothy Parker, there is almost no one there, there. There were points at which we could see from horizon to horizon and could only spot one farmhouse in that roughly 10 mile circle. Part of this is due, I'm sure to a natural emptying out process as farmers and ranchers discovered the limits of the land and consolidated the original homesteads. A Ranger mentioned that by the end of the homesteading era the government had increased the standard homesteading grant in this area from 160 acres to 640 acres because of the poor quality of the land, but I did not find any cross check on that tidbit of information. However, even Teddy Roosevelt wrote in one of his articles about how easily a poor land like the badlands is over grazed by even low densities of cattle. By the way, Teddy Roosevelt lost his shirt to the tune of $24,000 when the harsh winter of 1886-87 (I think) wiped out about 90 percent of the cattle in the badlands area, including most of his herd.

When we did our final zigzag north and west to get to Fort Union, we crossed the Yellowstone River that Clark had explored in 1806 on the way back from the Pacific Coast. I indulged in a daydream about taking a canoe, kayak, or raft from the Great Falls of the Yellowstone in Yellowstone National Park all the way to the confluence with the Missouri on the western edge of North Dakota for a while. I don't know how hard that would be, but wouldn't it be a hoot just to try it, though? One thing is sure: I'd rather do it going downstream than attempt pulling a heavy wooden pirogue upstream the way Lewis and Clark did on their way out west! I figure that going downstream if I get tired I could just relax and let the current carry me for an hour or two (or three or four...). I've never been accused of doing things the hard way!

We arrived at Fort Union around noon and spent about an hour and a half there altho I expect most normal folks could breeze thru it in a half an hour or less. This fort is an accurate reconstruction of a trading post for the fur trade from the 1830s to 1867. John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company established it, and it was ultimately dismantled for materials to help build the nearby Army post of Fort Buford. The heyday of the fur trade from the 1830s to the 1850s was a generally peaceful era of trading manufactured goods from all over the world for the various pelts and furs of the Native American tribes in the West. The fort was a square structure of plank walls guarded by large stone blockhouses on opposite corners. The actual trading area was right at the front entrance of the fort and it contained, as the narrator put it, the "Wal Mart for the Native Americans". In fact, there was an amazing variety of goods from all over the world ranging from practical items like guns, blankets and cooking pots to the impractical but nevertheless highly valued items like tobacco, paint pigments, beads, and liquor.

The head honcho of the trading post was called the "bourgeois". He lived in the large two story house in the center of the fort and ran the post but also initiated the trading process with the tribal chiefs. Trading had its social as well as commercial aspects and therefore included preliminary phases with much palavering, exchange of gifts, and I assume other ceremonial things like smoking the peacepipe together and so forth.

The reconstructed house contained a museum on the ground floor, in which I spent a happy hour looking carefully at the exhibits and reading all the descriptions. I read carefully because sometimes the trivial things seem to tell me the most about how society functioned at a particular time and place. For instance, everyone working for the company was guaranteed food in addition to their wages, but the nature of the food ranged from just hunks of meat given to the servant/laborer class to fancy four course meals served on nice china for the bourgeois and his guests. Those are social distinctions with a vengeance.

Another fascinating aspect of the history of the fort was the use of steamboats on the wild, untamed Missouri River. The "Yellowstone" made the first trip from St. Louis to Fort Union in 1832, but it took 75 days! I read somewhere else that before dams and flood control the navigable time span on the Missouri each year was quite short, ranging from the breakup of the ice in the spring only until the mid summer period because after that there wasn't enough water to float the boats! So 75 days would be a good part of that season and even when that was shortened to 45 days during the next 20 years I imagine they could only get 1 or at most 2 round trips in each year. I was so intrigued by these steamboats trying to force their way thru what was by all accounts a very inhospitable river environment that I broke down and bought a book on the history and technology of the Missouri River steamships in the gift shop. Just leafing thru it quickly I found confirmation of the tremendously high percentage of steamboats lost to accidents and boiler explosions along the river, confirming information that I had first read about in the "Arabia" museum in Kansas City (see Wanderung 3).

After chatting with a young woman who had bicycled her way up from the south, we headed west on US 2 for an hour, had lunch at a "Family Restaurant" in Culbertson, Montana, and continued on thru some pretty severe thunderstorms to camp for the night in Glasgow, Montana. The evening news on the radio featured a detailed report on the results of the local swimming club competing against a nearby town. Each youngster who had placed 1st, 2nd, or 3rd in any event had his or her name reported on the radio, which could either be gratifying or excruciatingly embarrassing to the youngster, I suppose. They never seemed to get around to any other local, national, or international news, so this was definitely life in the slow lane, newswise. We sandwiched in a light supper, so to speak, between phases of Monika doing the laundry and processing pictures and my catching up with writing the journal, after which we read our "soap opera" book for a bit before bed.

But this campground was a bit unusual, which I first noticed when I tried to use the men's room and found it locked with a big combination lock where you press the buttons in a certain sequence to get in. I had to go to the front desk to get the combination (1-2-3, for heaven's sake), but I still was uncertain why they locked the bathrooms. It may have had to do with being near a railroad yard; we could hear the clanking and banging of cars being shuttled at odd times during the evening, but fortunately they stopped for the night. Quite unfortunately, however, they started up again at 5:30 a.m. the next morning; I was awakened by the blast of a klaxon horn as the first train got underway. There's nothing quite like a train engine blowing those klaxon horns, especially if it sounds like it is coming right thru your trailer! It took me a second to wake up and remember that we were parked in a campground, not on some railroad tracks, so I didn't have to run for it (I don't know about you, but the thought of trying to push the trailer off the tracks never even occurred to me.).