3 September 2006 – Halliday, ND to Washburn, ND

Biking against the wind all day. I am wondering when (if?) the wind will ever shift in my favor. I was pushing pretty hard to make it to Washburn so that I could visit the Fort Mandan site before it closed. This is the area where Lewis and Clark spent their first winter after leaving St. Charles. They were in an area dominated by the Mandan and Hidatsa Indians and I passed a historical site where there are well-preserved earthen houses built by the Mandans. Interestingly, the Mandans built their villages on the bluffs above the river floodplain while Lewis and Clark built their fort in the floodplain. We have yet to learn the wisdom of building homes above the floodplain but the Mandans knew to do this long before European Americans came along.

I was running late because of wind and decided to call the visitor center. They told me that they don’t close until 7:00 PM. I was only about 5 miles away and it was 4:58 so I relaxed a little and powered up the hill from the Missouri River bottoms to the bluff on which the visitor center was built. This is a fairly nice visitor center but the reconstructed fort is about 2 miles away and back down in the bottoms. I headed out after talking to some people in the visitor center who were interested in my trip and visited the fort.

The fort was reconstructed on a site about 10 miles downstream of where the original forts was. The original had burned down during the time Lewis and Clark were in the Pacifica Northwest. Clark noted this in his journals. I was given a tour by a very personable high school student who is contemplating history as a field of study in college. This was a pretty nice site because they have the fort set up as it would have been when the L&C Expedition was there. They have stocked the room with bison hides, guns, barrels (of gunpowder and whiskey), etc. which makes the fort look like the occupants are all out hunting and will be coming back this evening. It must have been pretty rough to live a North Dakota winter in this structure. It supposedly got down to -40o F that winter. Most people slept in the lofts as warm air rises. Their first order of business while building the fort was trading with the local Native Americans for bison skin blankets as the blanket they brought with them were woefully inadequate. Lewis began the winter with guards on 2 hour shifts but ended up reducing that to 20 minute shifts because of the fear of his men freezing to death.

I slept in the public park down by the river and watched a beautiful sunset while I talked to Tac. It is free camping but no showering opportunity. Tomorrow I will be at a place called Prairie Nights (a casino/hotel) which is really the only place to stay between Bismark, ND and Mobridge, SD. I’ll be able to shower there and wash my clothes.

2 September 2006 – Alexander, ND to Halliday, ND - On Racism

I have stopped second guessing myself. From now on I am charting three goals for each day. A short, an intermediate and a long goal. Unfortunately, I resolve to do this on a day with mostly headwinds.

I woke up and headed to the café here in Alexander for some breakfast. Lots of Old Settlers sitting around talking and drinking coffee. I order breakfast and watch people interact. There is one table with six people in animated conversation. One of them is sitting in front of a window and he is highlighted by intense sun coming in. He is spewing lots of saliva as he talks. It might not be noticed but the sun calls it to my attention to the degree that it becomes difficult to continue to watch the group and eat. I wonder if the people are aware of this characteristic in their friend and if they are just waiting for him to leave.

A guy came over to my table as the café filled up. He asked me about my trip and I told him some and gave him the blog address. He was retired military and had moved here because of the cost of living. Apparently there is an oil boom going on in North Dakota. It was news to me but I had seen some pumps pulling oil out of the ground. Evidently it is a slightly more difficult type of oil deposit to recover so it is only economical when oil prices are really high. The presence of oil has driven up real estate prices around here.

I headed out from Alexander and toward Halliday. The winds that turned yesterday are continuing to blow in my faces at 10-15 mph. Not really a happy day. It is a Saturday (sometimes I lose track of which day of the week it is) so when I get to Halliday, most everything is closed. I got to the supermarket 15 minutes before it closed. I am also forced to stay in the Halliday Motel ($35). There is one bar in town that serves pizza so that is where I head.

On Racism

The bartender in the bar is quite chatty so I ask him how the community as a whole has responded to the Bicentennial Celebration of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. I am sitting at the bar next to an elderly couple. The bartender told me it was overall a pretty positive thing. I asked him how the local Native American groups felt about the whole thing. We are very near the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. He said that most Native Americans are people who sponge off the government and they are always complaining about how bad they have been treated. He then complained that, while they are closing the schools in Halliday, the Native Americans in New Town are spending $8 million on new schools 20 miles away. He also complained that Native Americans (of course he referred to them as Indians) are allowed to have casinos while casinos are not allowed in other parts of the state. I attempted to point out that Montana has casinos all over the state, presumably because they voted to allowed gambling statewide and the people of North Dakota opted not to approve statewide gambling. This didn’t seem to have much of an effect on the thinking of the bartender. Nor did me asking if, after the US government repeatedly failed to honor treaties with Native Americans, the US government maybe owed the Native Americans some small privileges given their checkered history with the Native Americans? He then went off on how most of the people claiming to be Native American are 1/16 Native American and he asked how Indian you have to be to get the benefits of being Indian. I realized that I was not going to change his thinking and he was just going to frustrate me, so I dropped the topic. I would also want to know how Native Americans feel about living on the Fort Peck Reservation and the Fort Berthold Reservation, etc. These were forts that were originally built as headquarters for the army sent out to protect the new European American settlers from the Native Americans and later to subjugate the Native Americans by either killing them or moving them onto reservations, thus freeing up land for agriculture by European Americans. And now the Native Americans refer to themselves as the “Fort Berthold Mandan-Hidatsa”. How ironic is that? Unfortunately, it did not occur to anyone at the time that the Native Americans were the ones who really needed protection from the European Americans. Irony is alive and well in the USA.

I finally finished my pizza and went back to my hotel to make some minor repairs on my bike and go to sleep.