Lost Agricultural Land: A Stop at Knife River Indian Villages

My last afternoon in North Dakota is a quest to find out what happened to Indigenous farmland

June 23, 2026

It’s just before 1:00 p.m. when I leave Menoken Farm. Instead of returning to my campground, I head north. There are a couple more places I want to visit on my last afternoon in North Dakota, places that add another perspective to the challenges facing North Dakota farmers.

My first stop, about an hour’s drive north of Menoken, is the Lewis and Clark interpretive center, managed by the North Dakota State Historical Society. I arrive just in time to go on the 2:00 p.m. tour of reconstructed Fort Mandan, which was where Lewis and Clark and the rest of the Corps of Discovery spent the winter of 1804–1805 on their voyage up the Missouri River.

This reconstruction of Fort Mandan is based on journals from the Corps of Discovery

What I’m most interested in is not Lewis and Clark themselves, but the Hidatsa, Mandan, and Arikara communities they encountered on their voyage up the Missouri. Many villages had already been abandoned due to smallpox epidemics, including the On-a-Slant village I saw this morning. But the Hidatsa villages along the Knife River were still thriving.

One thing I appreciate about Fort Mandan is that the guide tells us we’re welcome to touch anything. I bury my hands in a thick buffalo hide hanging in the storeroom. The dense, curly hair is three inches long—I can see why the hides made such good winter blankets in this harsh climate. I'm also intrigued by replicas of Hidatsa corn, squash, beans, and sunflowers—plus some real slices of dried squash.

I appreciate these reconstructed Hidatsa crops at Fort Mandan, especially the unique variety of squash that they sliced and dried at the summer squash stage

After I tour Fort Mandan, I cross the Missouri River and drive another half hour to the Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site. This is the village where Lewis and Clark picked up a French interpreter named Toissant Charbonneau and one of his Indigenous wives, Sacagawea, a Shoshone who was kidnapped by the Hidatsa when she was a teenager. It’s also where Buffalo Bird Woman’s people lived before they moved to Like-a-Fishhook Village where she grew up.

Knife River Indian Villages isn't a very popular National Park Service unit--there were only two other visitors there

Knife River Indian Villages is definitely not one of the top-visited National Park Service sites. The only people in the visitor center when I walk in around 3:30 are three friendly rangers, who are happy to tell me everything they know about Hidatsa/Mandan/Arikara agriculture, which is mostly from Buffalo Bird Woman’s Garden. One ranger gives me a guided tour of the Hidatsa demonstration garden and earthlodge. This earthlodge is furnished just like the diagram in Buffalo Bird Woman’s book, complete with beds and a cache pit in the floor for food storage.

A friendly ranger took me on a tour inside the reconstructed earthlodge, which is furnished just like the layout in Buffalo Bird Woman's book

Outside the earthlodge is the Hidatsa garden, fenced in to keep out critters since there aren’t any women around to guard the crops and sing songs to naughty boys. The corn, squash, sunflower, and bean plants are traditional varieties, but they’re not grown in the traditional hills. The rangers explain that the traditional methods don’t work on the high prairies, only on the river bottoms. They believe the people who lived in this particular village farmed the land on the other side of the river, which is owned by a private landowner who doesn’t like the national park. There’s no bottomland on the site where they can grow a fully authentic garden, and doing any kind of farming on an archaeological site—even as a historic reconstruction—is problematic.

The rangers at Knife River are doing their best with what they have to work with, but they can't use traditional Hidatsa farming methods on the high prairie

I thank the rangers for the information, look through the small museum, and then hike the short, gravel trail to the actual village sites. It’s somewhat anticlimactic—all there is to see are some indentations in the mowed grass marking where the ancient earthlodges stood. At one time, 5,000 people lived here, and it was a bustling city. Now there’s nobody except me. Even the prairie is degraded—it’s mostly nonnative smooth bromegrass, which has choked out the native vegetation in all but a few areas.

This is all that's left of a Hidatsa village that once housed 5,000 people

I am slowly realizing that I’m not going to be able to find any example—not even a reconstruction—of traditional Hidatsa/Mandan/Arikara agricultural methods on the river bottomlands. The problem isn’t lack of information, since we have Buffalo Bird Woman’s Garden. The problem is that very few of the fertile bottomlands remain.

The rangers believe that the Hidatsa did most of their farming on the far side of the Knife River, but there's no chance of making reconstruction gardens there because the landowner doesn't like the national park

The story of what happened to the arable bottomlands is tragic. It begins with the typical land-grab sequence of westward expansion—the federal government signed a treaty with the Three Affiliated Tribes in 1851 guaranteeing that they could keep twelve million acres of their ancestral land, then forced them onto the 988,000-acre Fort Berthold Reservation in 1870, then sold half of that land to white settlers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, leaving the tribes only 457,837 acres.

Despite losing so much of their land, the Three Affiliated Tribes were still able to farm the rich bottomlands until the 1940s. That’s when the government built the Garrison Dam, which flooded all of the Missouri River bottomlands on the Fort Berthold reservation, destroying their farms and leaving the people impoverished and unable to grow much food. As the rangers at Knife River pointed out, the traditional methods don’t work on the high and dry prairie—and as I’ve learned from visiting other farms, modern methods struggle there, too.

I had originally considered driving farther up the road to see the Garrison Dam, but I don’t have time now. It’s almost 5:00 p.m., it’s been a long day, and it’s an hour’s drive back to my campground. That drive roughly parallels (but not close enough to see it) the only section of the Missouri River where the bottomlands aren’t flooded. Everything south of Fort Abraham Lincoln is flooded by dams in South Dakota. Everything north of the Garrison Dam is flooded under Lake Sakakawea. I wonder if anyone has noticed the bitter irony of naming the lake that destroyed so much Indigenous farmland after an Indigenous woman.

It’s too late when I get back to Fort Abraham Lincoln to go on a tour of General Custer’s house; it closed at 5:00. I’m not really sad that I missed the opportunity. I had to choose between Custer’s house and the earthlodges and, well, I chose the earthlodges. But our country as a whole chose Custer. And I can’t help but wonder how many of the problems plaguing North Dakota agriculture today stem from that choice.

I ran out of time to tour the reconstruction of General Custer's house