Vacation 2009 - Heading to North Dakota

This is page ten of our vacation 2009 blog. The first page is here.

Big Sky Country

If you live in the Midwest, there is one unalterable fact about traveling to the West. It doesn't matter how far North or South you go, you still must cross the Great Plains before you get to the mountains, and you must cross again on your way back.

We drove over 500 miles in Montana after leaving the mountains and Glacier National Park.

As we drive across northern Montana, I can see why they call it "Big Sky Country". Sometimes, the sky is about all you can see. I sit back and imagine that the wheat fields are native grasses, and the grazing cattle are some of the great herds of buffalo that once roamed the area. The occasional towns might be Indian villages. Though the area has changed dramatically in the last hundred years or so, in some ways it has not changed at all.

Believe it or not, I did not take any pictures at all during the trek across the Montana plains

Some day I may retrace the steps of Lewis and Clark across this vast land, or follow the Oregon Trail or the Pony Express. I am sure there are many interesting places in the Great Plains, islands in this great sea, such as we found at North Platte. But for now, these destinations are not as high on my list of places I want to see. When crossing the plains takes a couple days out of a limited itinerary, it seems more of a barrier than a destination.

Fort Union Trading Post

The restored Fort Union Trading Post is on the Missouri River, and is quite literally on the border between Montana and North Dakota. The parking lot is in Montana, and the fort itself is in North Dakota. If you take the right road the first time, it is only about 20 miles off the highway, and is definitely worth a stop if you are traveling on U.S. 2 in the area. We drove a little farther than that, because we were debating whether we had enough time for this stop, and ended up cutting across and coming up from the south.

Fort Union was not actually a military fort, but it was fortified like one to protect the goods and inhabitants. Just inside the front gate, we found the Trading Room, where we chatted with a man in period costume about the fort and how the trading was done.

The first thing you see inside the walls is the bourgeois house, a grand two-story structure that almost seemed out of place amid the more meager surroundings. The fort's manager was known as the Bourgeois, reflecting the French Canadian part of the American Fur Company's background. The Bourgeois and his chief clerk and families lived in the Bourgeois house. Other employees lived in the dwellings and shops outside the house. Some of the employees who took Indian wives lived in teepees outside the fort.

The difference between the Bourgeois house and the outer dwellings was startling. Although there were no restored dwellings on the site, you could see from the foundations that a dwelling was smaller than a typical room in the house.

The restored Bourgeois House, thankfully, was air-conditioned. It was a fairly hot day on the prairie when we were there, and I just don't deal with heat the way I used to. The house now serves as the visitor center, and houses a small museum with artifacts and more information about the trading post and the surrounding area.

North Dakota Badlands

Heading South from Fort Union, we catch our first glimpse of the North Dakota badlands just before getting to the North Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park.

Next Page: Theodore Roosevelt National Park