Can dogs hike in Fort Abraham Lincoln State Park?

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Two rivers meet below this bluff, the Heart and the Missouri. On the slope above them stand earthlodges, the kind of permanent homes the Mandan lived in, and on the hill behind them stand three rebuilt blockhouses from an Army post. This is Fort Abraham Lincoln State Park, where a Mandan village and the fort that sent Custer to the Little Bighorn share one hillside.

Before the park

The Mandan built a village here around fifteen seventy-five. They named it On-A-Slant, because it sat on a plain sloping toward the river.

In seventeen eighty-one smallpox nearly wiped out the Heart River Mandan, and the survivors moved about forty miles upriver. When William Clark passed in October of eighteen oh four, he wrote of "an old remains of a villige on the Side of a hill".

The Mandan call themselves Nueta. With the Hidatsa, who call themselves Hiráaca, and the Arikara, who are the Sahnish, they govern together as the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, from New Town on the Fort Berthold Reservation. Lakota and Dakota people govern at Standing Rock, from Fort Yates, where the Lakota language is being revitalized.

The outsiders who stayed came for a railroad. The Army arrived in June of eighteen seventy-two with an infantry post, renamed Fort Abraham Lincoln that November. The Northern Pacific Railway reached Bismarck the next summer, and the tribes resisted it but could not stop the building.

Making the park

In eighteen seventy-three Congress authorized a cavalry post here, and within a year it was one of the largest forts on the northern plains, about six hundred fifty men. Its first commander was Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer of the Seventh Cavalry. In eighteen seventy-four he led the regiment into the Black Hills, an expedition that confirmed rumors of gold and led to the breaking of the treaty with the Sioux.

Once the railroad reached Montana the fort mattered less, and the Army decommissioned it in eighteen ninety-one. Settlers took the buildings apart for their own homes and farms.

The state park came in nineteen oh seven, the oldest in North Dakota. In the nineteen thirties the Civilian Conservation Corps, crews of young men who built much of the park, laid its roads and campground and rebuilt the blockhouses and five earthlodges. Custer's house went back up on its old site in nineteen eighty-nine, paid for by volunteers.

One story

In May of eighteen seventy-six, forty Arikara men enlisted here as soldiers, at thirteen dollars a month.

On the morning of May seventeenth, the band played Garryowen, the regiment's marching tune, one last time for Custer as the Seventh Cavalry rode out. His wife, Libbie, rode with the column as far as the Heart River and came back the next day. It was the last time she saw her husband alive. She wrote later that with his departure her last happy days in garrison were ended.

At the Little Bighorn, twenty-two of the Arikara crossed the river with Major Reno. Their war chief, Bob-tailed Bull, was killed there, with Little Brave and the scout Bloody Knife.

The news came back by river. On the evening of July third, Captain Grant Marsh took the steamboat Far West away from the mouth of the Little Bighorn, with the wounded aboard. He reached Bismarck at about eleven at night on July fifth, some seven hundred miles in fifty-four hours. He carried word that Custer, fourteen other officers and two hundred thirty-seven enlisted men were dead. The telegraph operator spent twenty-two hours sending it out to the world.

Fifty-four hours on the river, to carry that news home.

Today

The state counts this among its most-visited parks. Six earthlodges stand on the slope now, among them a large council lodge.

How to tell Custer's story is still argued here, and the park says it is working toward telling all sides of it. At the rebuilt house's thirtieth anniversary, Gerard Baker, a Hidatsa man and a former assistant director of the National Park Service, said some old-timers are still very upset by what Custer did to Indian people. "But it's history," he said, "and as long as we know that, we never want history to repeat itself".

One trail is named for Young Hawk, an Arikara scout who fought at the Little Bighorn and lived to tell it. From the main road, look for the earthlodges on the slope above the two rivers. This is Fort Abraham Lincoln State Park.