7/19/2011:
On this date in 1964 the National Park Service designated a small, abandoned American Indian Village located near present-day Menoken, ND, a National Historic Landmark. Thinking the village was the same visited by the famous La Vérendrye expedition in 1738, the Park Service looked to preserve the location of what it believed to be the earliest recorded contact between Europeans and American Indians in North Dakota. But the experts were mistaken.
In 1730, Pierre Gaultier de La Vérendrye, a French officer of modest wealth, set out in hopes of discovering the fabled Northwest Passage, the mythical waterway connecting the Atlantic with the Pacific. As La Vérendrye and his sons traversed the northern prairies, they became the first Europeans to map and explore large portions of the North-American interior. After years of exhausting travel, La Vérendrye failed in his quest to discover the Northwest Passage, but his efforts resulted in the earliest maps of the region and some of the earliest written records of Northern Plains American Indians. Yet, La Vérendrye’s notes and descriptions of the places and people he encountered were not always clear. Thus, when later archeologists looked to compare La Vérendrye’s notes with contemporary knowledge of Native American history, mistakes were inevitably made.
In 1938, two archeologists, George Will and Thadeus Hecker, excavated a small village on a bluff a few miles from the Missouri River. Given the similarities between it and the La Vérendrye accounts of interaction with the Mandan, Will and Hecker believed they had found the lost site of the first recorded contact between Europeans and American Indians in what is now North Dakota. However, subsequent archeologists, using the latest in scientific equipment, revealed that Will and Hecker were incorrect. The Menoken village is considerably older, long abandoned by the time La Vérendrye first made contact with the Mandan people. Additionally, the village was not Mandan, but had been built around 1200 A.D. by their ancestors, the Late Plains Woodland people.
While archeologists no longer believe the Menoken village to be the site of one of the earliest interactions between Europeans and American Indians on the Northern Plains, it is significant none-the-less as one of the oldest American Indian villages in North Dakota and remains an important National Historic Landmark.
Dakota Datebook written by Lane Sunwall
Sources
"The La Verendrye Expeditions." Canadian Military History Gateway, http://www.cmhg.gc.ca/cmh/page-137-eng.asp.
"Menoken Indian Village State Historic Site." State Historical Society of North Dakota, http://history.nd.gov/historicsites/menoken/index.html.
Ronda, James P. "Lewis and Clark among the Indians." University of Nebraska Press, http://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/read/?_xmlsrc=lc.ronda.01.04.xml&_xslsrc=LCstyles.xsl.
Snortland, J. Signe, ed. A Traveler's Companion to North Dakota State Historic Sites. Bismarck, ND: State Historical Society of North Dakota, 1996.