Visitors can still see these trenches today. I walk among them in the blustery wind.ĭouble Ditch takes its name from two distinctive trenches that once served as fortifications for the Mandan settlement here. The landscape is pockmarked with these silent homes of ancient Americans. The larger depressions denote earth lodges. Most of the smaller depressions we see today indicate the location of cache pits, once the warehouses for thousands of bushels of corn. Shallow basins in the soil mark the places where they built structures for their daily life. The Ruptare Mandans-one group among several that made up the Mandan people-occupied Double Ditch for nearly three hundred years. I picture women in hide-covered bull boats on the river below, ferrying firewood from afar. But my mind's eye still populates the town with hazy human figures, domed earth lodges, raised drying scaffolds, and yapping dogs. If I believed in ghosts, they would abound here. This unleashes the imagination in ways that places like Colonial Williamsburg never will. It has no reconstructions and little interpretation beyond a few state-funded signposts. Perched on a grassy plain overlooking the Missouri River from the east, it is the kind of historic site I like best. Migrations: The Making of the Mandan PeopleĭOUBLE DITCH STATE HISTORIC SITE, AUGUST 4, 2002ĭouble Ditch Village is desolate, windy, and magnificent.
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