The Garrison Dam that made Lake Sakakawea drowned the fertile river bottoms of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara, a loss whose wound the Fort Berthold community carries still.

Where the Yellowstone meets the Missouri, the trading post of Fort Union stood for decades as the busiest hub of the northern fur trade, a meeting ground of nations and goods.

It was among the Hidatsa villages that the Lewis and Clark expedition wintered and met Sakakawea, the young Shoshone woman whose knowledge would prove vital to the journey west.

Long before the homesteaders, the Mandan and Hidatsa built thriving earthlodge towns along the Missouri, farming the bottoms and trading across the plains from the great villages at the Knife River.