North Dakota: A Guide to the Northern Prairie State

by Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration for the State of North Dakota

Below the North Roosevelt Park ranches are fewer, and people are seldom seen from the river.

The wider, majestic Missouri is soon reached, and forms the route for the remainder of the voyage. Up this avenue of exploration came Lewis and Clark, Maximilian, Catlin, Ashley, Lisa, and other adventurous explorers and traders; first in the round, unwieldy, skin bullboats of the Indians, and later in the chugging steamboats, plying the river in search of trade between the tribes and forts established along its course.

The seasonal rising and lowering of the Missouri's water level continually changes the channel, leaving shoals, sand bars, and snags, and these offered a problem to river pilots as long as steamboat traffic flourished on the river. When a flat-bottomed steamer ran aground it took hours, and sometimes days, to release it. It was from the odd device used to work the boats off sand bars that the term "grasshoppering" came into use. Each steamer carried two long, heavy spars, similar to telephone poles, near the bow ready for use. Capt. Grant Marsh, an old river pilot, describes the operation of these spars in Joseph Mills Hanson's Conquest of the Missouri:

"When she became lodged on a bar, the spars were raised and set in the river bottom, like posts, their tops inclined somewhat toward the bow. Above the line of the deck each was rigged with a tackle-block over which a manila cable was passed, one end being fastened to the gunwale of the boat and the other end wound around the capstan. As the capstan was turned and the paddlewheel revolved, the boat was thus lifted and pushed forward. Then the spars were re-set farther ahead and the process repeated until the boat was at last literally lifted over the bar. From the grotesque resemblance to a grasshopper which the craft bore when her spars were set, and from the fact that she might be said to move forward in a series of hops, the practice came to be called 'grasshoppering.'"

From the beginning river steamers were dependent on wood for fuel, and as traffic increased woodyards became more numerous along the stream. At first they were operated only by the hardiest of white frontiersmen, but as the agency Indians absorbed the white man's civilization they too began to cut wood to sell. Steamers usually burned either cedar or cottonwood, although the latter was suitable for fuel only when fully dried, while cedar burned readily either green or cured. Boat captains took all the cedar the Indians could stack, but would not stop their boats when they saw only green cottonwood corded. The Indians soon learned a subterfuge to surmount the difficulty of having only cottonwood on hand. They smeared the freshly hewn ends of cottonwood cuttings with vermilion so that it resembled cedar, stacked the wood with the painted ends toward the river, and trusted that when a boat stopped she would take the camouflaged cottonwood rather than waste more time.

The Missouri passes beneath the black steel span of FOUR BEARS BRIDGE, the bridge with 19 Indian names (see Side Tour 3A.) Approximately 2 m. below the bridge the river passes within 2 m. of ELBOWOODS (see Side Tour 3A), inland to the L., the first town neared in the more than 200 m. of drifting since Medora was left behind. (Good camp site on the Elbowoods side of the Missouri.)

On the bluffs opposite Elbowoods is the SITE OF A HIDATSA INDIAN VILLAGE, which according to tradition was once besieged by the Sioux, who expected to win an easy victory by curtailing the village water supply. Hidatsa scouts, however, had learned of the planned attack, and the people in the village made rock-filled reservoirs and carried water from the river to fill them. Repulsing the first attack of the Sioux, the besieged rolled a skin of water down the hill toward their enemy, which, the legend says, so discouraged the besiegers that they abandoned their efforts to capture the village and withdrew.

The reservation borders both sides of the river from here to a point a short distance downstream from Ree.

Below Elbowoods the river passes the sites of GRANDMOTHER'S LODGE, FORT BERTHOLD, REE, and NISHU (see Side Tour 3A). EXPANSION (R) consists of a post office and store marking the site of a formerly active river town. (Good camp site bet. Ree and Expansion.)

Just upstream W. of Expansion is a large, easily detected sandstone promontory known as MANUEL ROCK (R), used as a landmark by old river pilots, and named for the fur trader Manuel Lisa.