Below Expansion are (L) the mouth of GARRISON CREEK and the SITE OF FORT STEVENSON. The site was selected by Gen. Alfred H. Sully in 1864 on his trip down the Missouri during his second campaign, but the fort was not established until 1867. A two-company post named for Brig. Gen. Thomas G. Stevenson, the fort was abandoned in 1883 and the military reservation turned over to the Interior Department. For a short time the buildings were used as a school for Indian children from the Fort Berthold Agency. Garrison Creek was originally called Douglas Creek, but the name was changed when the Stevenson garrison began using it for bathing purposes.
A few miles below Garrison Creek is SNAKE CREEK (L), called Ma po ksa a ti a zi (Hidatsa, snake house river), where a cave along the banks of the Missouri near the mouth of the creek, according to legend, swarmed with snakes at certain seasons.
A short distance downstream from the Fort Stevenson site the course of the Missouri turns S. and passes MANNHAVEN (R), remnant of a once thriving river town. Near the present village in 1809 the Missouri Fur Co., directed by Manuel Lisa, erected a trading post known variously as Fort Manuel Lisa and Fort Lewis, the latter for Reuben Lewis—brother of Meriwether Lewis, coleader of the Lewis and Clark expedition—who operated it until its abandonment in 1812. Under the name of Fort Vanderburgh, the site was later occupied briefly in 1822 or 1823. Lisa, born in New Orleans of Spanish parents, is said to have had more influence over the Indians with whom he dealt than any other trader to enter the Missouri area, although his activities in the Missouri basin were of only 13 years duration. He died in St. Louis at the age of 48.
The mouth of the KNIFE RIVER is just upstream from STANTON (see Side Tour 8D). (Camp can be made on R. river bank.)
In the vicinity of the confluence of the Knife and Missouri are the sites of many Indian villages, Hidatsa, Mandan, and Arikara, the locations of which are easily traceable by the many round, dish-like depressions marking the sites of earth lodges in the villages. The Hidatsa had three villages here until 1837 when the smallpox epidemic reduced their population to only one village. Prior to their occupation of the Knife River vicinity the tribe lived near the mouth of the Heart River (see Tour 8), and in 1845, for protection from the Sioux, they moved to Fort Berthold. The Mandans, whose two villages some miles below the Knife were reduced to little more than 100 persons by the smallpox epidemic of 1837, moved to a small village near the Hidatsa, and followed that tribe to Fort Berthold in 1845. Migrating up the Missouri at a later date, the Arikara built villages near the Knife as late as 1851, but they too, because of continued Sioux raids, moved to Fort Berthold.
It was at one of the Knife River villages, that Charbonneau, and his Shoshone Indian wife, Sakakawea, lived in 1804 when Lewis and Clark employed Charbonneau as interpreter of the expedition to the Pacific (see Bismarck).
Below Stanton is DEAPOLIS (R), marked by a single grain elevator, all that remains of another of the towns that sprang up along the Missouri, flourished, and declined with the steamboat trade. The place was named by its founder, who replaced the first letter in the name of the ancient city Neapolis with the first letter of his own surname, Danielson.
Old residents tell the story that in the summer of 1894 the river at Deapolis was extremely low, exposing a huge boulder in the center of the stream. An interested group made their way to the stone, and found it carved with peculiar markings they were unable to decipher. Before leaving they added the date of their visit to the inscription. Forty years later the river stage again was low enough to bring the stone above water, and a second party visited it, and found the same undecipherable markings as well as the carving of the 1894 party.
Near the Deapolis elevator is the SITE OF BIG WHITE'S MANDAN INDIAN VILLAGE. Big White was the Mandan chief taken to Washington by Lewis and Clark on their return from the Pacific, and his village was one of two Mandan towns visited by the expedition on the journey up the Missouri in 1804-5. The other, Black Cat's Village, was on the L. bank of the river farther upstream. Lewis and Clark's Fort Mandan was built on the L. bank downstream from the Deapolis site, but the changing river channel has removed all trace of the fort, and Black Cat's Village has never been definitely located (see Tour 3).