North Dakota, Ancient Wonders

We finally reached North Dakota.  We set up our mobile house in a park located near the village of Monoken.  I laugh as I call it a village as it certainly qualifies as a ghost town.  We took some time to investigate this home of about 62 people in hopes of learning what brought the community together and why it died.  It was really a pitiful place.  The post office, a small squat white building has long been closed.  The town hall looked much like a church.  It was also painted white but was boarded up and the prairie grasses had begun to lay claim to the land once again.  There were a few homes and mobile homes that looked like they might be inhabited but mostly the homes were tired, clapboard structures that the prairie winds have robbed of their paint and the weeds and grasses have begun to weave a cocoon over them.  I tried to picture in my mind what it might have looked like in its heyday with people coming and going.  The only structure that is well kept is the elementary school.  There was work going on getting it ready for the beginning of the new school year.  It stands as testimony that life in this place continues and the spirit of the west and why people came is very much alive.

The nearest city is Bismarck about 10 miles from where we were camping.  It has all the usual suspects of civilization, Walmart, Kohl’s, McDonald’s and others but we weren't interested in any of these.  We wanted to learn about the state and the people who first came here.  We turned our attention to the North Dakota Heritage Center & State Museum.  It is a large complex that houses the history of the state from prehistoric time to today.

In the entrance courtyard there were 17 ball shaped rocks surrounding a pool of water.  We wondered are they dinosaur eggs?  Surely not that is crazy.  Turns out they are cannonball concretions.  Concretion?  They are 60 million year old sandstone spheres formed in layers around an organic center, think of a pearl.  Just how they were formed I do not know, perhaps the wind would blow the centers across the sand and over time additional layers would make them bigger — you get the picture.  60 million years old, that’s older than Jim!

Inside the museum there was so much to see.  Each gallery is divided into time periods: Geologic Time, Early Peoples, Yesterday & Today and the Governors Gallery. This fine specimen is a Mastodon.  He lived at the end of the last ice age.  Standing 8 feet at the shoulders and weighing at a whopping 8,000 pounds, it is hard to imagine how ancient peoples managed to bring one down with their primitive tools.

As we moved into the gallery, I was reminded that this entire region from Canada down through South Dakota and beyond was once covered by shallow oceans.  We visited places in Canada where dinosaurs were discovered and have seen movies and read about bones discovered in this area.  But still, what a surprise at the number of fossils that were on display.    Would you like to hook a fish as big and fierce as this?  Can you imagine this Crocodile sleeping peacefully beside the water hazard on the golf course?

I have seen Sloths in zoos.  They are slow moving, harmless looking creatures.  Imagine facing one of these!  

No exhibit would be complete without the T-Rex.  This one was quite magnificent too.  Top of the food chain for his time for sure.

The next gallery was all about the ancient peoples specifically the Native Peoples who lived in this area.  One of them were the Mandan people.  Earlier in the day, we visited a dig near where we are camped.  It dates back to 1200 AD and is thought to have at one time been inhabited by over 300 people.  It is amazing how the Indian people honored the land and learned how to live here in the prairie where the winds blow most of the time and drought is common.  They planted crops and selected the best seeds year to year to develop varieties that grew well here and are still cultivated to this day.  I won’t bore you with a dialogue of all the tribes but we all know what happened when the “white” man came on the scene.  The cultures were impacted drastically even when they were not hostile but rather helped the early settlers.  There was a section of lithographs by George Catlin.  He painted pictures of the life of the Mandan and other tribes that romanticized their lives in many ways.  The art was quite moving and included a collection of sculptures that were lovely as well.

I could ramble on and on but you would probably get bored.  The remainder of the museum dealt with the many ways that folks in ND have evolved and developed things to help them survive here in this vast prairie.  Even though ND has the third smallest population of all the states, they have done some amazing things in developing machines to help till the land to stop lights and other trappings of the modern world.  All in all, it was good day and we came away with a better understanding of life on the prairie.