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Whither the Rest of the Continent? ELIZABETH A. FENN Late fall is a difficult time to travel on America’s northern prairies. In a warm spell, the sun might draw daytime temperatures into the 50s, but more typically they hover around the freezing mark. Even in October, the weather can turn bitter. Pools of standing water freeze solid at night, the Missouri River ices over entirely, and relentless northwest winds carry with them the first real snows of winter.1 It was nevertheless in the late fall of 1738 that an unlikely party of travelers meandered southwestward across these interior grasslands. The party came from modern-day Manitoba; its destination was modern-day North Dakota. Among its members were some twenty-odd Frenchmen, at least one Native-American slave, and 142 families of Assiniboine Indians . In all, there were more than of six hundred people. They proceeded on foot, marching Indian style in three columns that wound serpent-like through undulating waves of grass.2 Elizabeth A. Fenn is an Assistant Professor of History at Duke University. She is the author of Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–82 (2001) and the coauthor, with Peter H. Wood, of Natives & Newcomers: The Way We Lived in North Carolina before 1770 (1983). She is currently working on a book on the rise and fall of the Mandan nation, 1738–1837. 1. On October 31, 1804, north of present-day Bismarck, North Dakota, William Clark and Meriwether Lewis reported the Missouri ‘‘very low and the season so far advanced that it frequently shuts up with ice in this climate.’’ The expedition thus established winter quarters among the Mandans. Gary E. Moulton, ed., The Definitive Journals of Lewis & Clark (10 vols., Lincoln, 2002–03), 3:219. 2. G. Hubert Smith, The Explorations of the La Vérendryes in the Northern Plains, 1738–1743, ed. W. Raymond Wood (Lincoln, 1980), 47–50. This work contains the most recent and trustworthy translation of La Vérendrye’s journal. 18 • ELIZABETH FENN At the head of the Frenchmen was a fur trader–explorer named Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, Sieur de la Vérendrye. His intent was to find the Indians he called the ‘‘Mantannes,’’ or Mandans, and to learn from them the route to the long-sought Sea of the West. The Sea of the West was a myth, a creation of wishful imagination on the part of the French, whose pursuit of it mirrored the contemporaneous English hunt for a Northwest Passage. For La Vérendrye, this quest, along with the gathering of furs, was his life’s mission. He understood from Indian stories that the fabled sea could be reached by way of the Mandans. And he likewise believed that once he found it, the sea would lead him to the Pacific Ocean.3 With this goal in mind, the French explorers followed their Assiniboine guides across what La Vérendrye termed ‘‘magnificent plains.’’ Each step they took extended the bounds of the European known world. When they finally arrived among the Mandans on December 3, an enormous crowd greeted them. The Frenchmen were the first Europeans ever to set foot in the tidy streets and massive earth lodges these Indians called home.4 But the edge of the world for the French constituted the very center of the world for the Mandans. Indeed, these corn- and bean-growing farmers occupied a country quite close to the middle of the North American continent.5 Their settlements felt impressively urban to the French newcomers. Fortified by ditches and great wooden palisades, each contained hundreds—even thousands—of people. La Verendrye counted ‘‘as many as 130’’ lodges in the village where he halted his journey. So numerous and so indistinguishable were the dwellings that the visitors ‘‘often lost their way among them.’’6 La Vérendrye reported a total of five Mandan ‘‘forts’’ within a day’s journey of the one where he stopped. These were almost certainly the villages clustered on both sides of the Missouri River near modern-day Bismarck and Mandan, North Dakota, where the Heart River flows in from the west. There may have been other Mandan settlements as well, 3. Ibid., 20–22. 4. Ibid., 50, 59. 5. Today, the town of Rugby, North Dakota, roughly ninety miles from the former site of the Heart River villages, stakes a contentious claim to this honor. 6. Smith, Explorations of the La Vérendryes, 59. [3.16.81...

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