| Summary: | 174 EARLY HISTORY OF NORTH DAKOTA free trappers, and bands of Indians, forming in all as wild and motley a crowd as a boat ever met in port. "Immediately upon landing, and even before the interchange of salutations was complete, the unloading of the cargo was begun. No time was to be lost in the navigation of the Missouri. Should the spring rise go down before the return of the boat, she would have to stay up all the year, as happened with the steamer Assiniboine in 1834-5. "Night and day the roustabouts (deck hands) of the boat and the engagees (employees) of the fort, were busy carrying off the goods and carrying on the furs. A banquet on the boat, and another with the bourgeois, completed the fes-tivities, and almost before the denizens of the fort had taken their eyes from the strange visitor, she hauled in her lines, and was speeding back to St. Louis." From St. Louis to Fort Union was 1,760 miles. From a record kept by Charles Larpenteur from 1841 to 1847 the average speed of the steamboats from St. Louis to Fort Union was forty-four miles a day for the up trip and 123 miles for the down trip; the time for the up trip ranging from eighty days in 1841 to forty days in 1847, and for the down trip from thirty-one days in 1845 to four-teen days in 1847. O^i the down trip in 1832 the steamer Yellowstone carried 1,300 packs of robes and beaver. The weight of beaver shipped July 11 that year was 10,230 lb., and they expected to take on 120 to 130 packs from Pierre. Lucien Fontenelle left Fort Union that year on September 24th with 6,000 lb. of beaver from the Yellowstone, shipped in mackinaws as stated in Chapter XL FORT CLARK Fort Clark was established in 1830 by James Kipp—previously mentioned as having also built Tilton's Fort—under the direction of Kenneth McKenzie, for the Mandan trade. It was on the right or south bank of the Missouri River, fifty-five miles above the Northern Pacific Railroad bridge at Bismarck, on a bluflf, in an angle of the river, on the opposite side of the river from Fort Mandan — built by Lewis and Clark in i8o4^and was named for Governor William Clark, the Captain Clark of the Lewis and Clark expedition. The fort was 132 by 147 feet, subs*^antially built, and one of the most important posts on the Missouri River, aside from Fort Union. Having been abandoned by the traders, who had moved to Fort Berthold, it was in the possession of the Arikaras in 1862, when, most of the warriors being absent on their winter hunt, it was attacked by the Sioux and entirely destroyed. The last vestige of the Mandan villages, later known as the "Ree" Village, having disappeared, the Arikaras joined the Mandans and Gros-Ventres »(Hidatsa) at Fort Berthold. FORT PI EGA N In 1831 James Kipp built Fort Piegan for the Blackfeet trade, at the mouth of the Marias River, and when he went down the river with his furs, the next spring, it was burned by the Indians. Internet Archive
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