September 13: Would you like some lutefisk with that, Thor?

What a pretty day. Seriously. My first stop of the day was at Detroit Lake, which is the centerpiece of the eponymously named town of Detroit Lakes (no, I didn’t see the other lakes, but that’s okay).

I’m still seeing wildflowers even in September in this climate, too, which makes me happy.

Sunflowers and asters at Detroit Lakes.

Across far western Minnesota.

I reached Moorhead, Minnesota, on the North Dakota line, around noon, and went looking for [googles to get the spelling right] the Heritage Hjemkomst Interpretive Center, which is nominally the local historical society, but in fact is the home of two enormous fascinating artifacts. The first is a sort of Thor-Heyerdahl-in-reverse authentic Viking ship reproduction that was built nearby, then sailed from Duluth, Minnesota, to Oslo, Norway, back in the early 1980s. I was a fan of Heyerdahl when I was a kid, so the story of Robert Asp and his dream becoming a reality was fascinating to me, and the ship was impressive, if difficult to photograph.

The outside of the museum.

The viking ship, and now you see why the odd roof [g].

The other huge artifact is a reproduction stave (pronounced, to my surprise, as STAHV, not STAYV) church. It’s an exact copy, made by another local man, Guy Paulsen, of the Hopperstad Stave Church, built during the 12th and 13th centuries in the backwoods of Norway. I’d always wanted to see a stave church, after seeing pictures and film of them, and since I’ll be lucky if I ever get to any part of Scandinavia in this lifetime, well, I jumped at the chance to see this one.

The stave church.

The front door. Look at all that beautiful hand-carved wood.

It smells like my father’s workshop in there. They do use the building as a wedding venue. Can you imagine a cooler place to get married?

Looking up at the inside of the ceiling.

The museum has the usual local history exhibits, too, but aside from the church and the ship, the temporary exhibits were what caught my eye. One was a traveling exhibit about the history of the education of the blind, and the other was about the history of liquor in the area. Apparently because North Dakota’s liquor laws were much stricter than Minnesota’s, and due to its proximity to non-Prohibitioned Canada, Moorhead was a very exciting place to be in the early decades of this century [g].

This is probably the most amusing image from the liquor exhibit, a guy dressed up as a can of beer.

The museum’s café sells a mean bowl of vegetable beef soup with homemade noodles, too. No lutefisk, though, thank goodness.

Crossing the Red River of the North from Minnesota to North Dakota, and from Moorhead to Fargo.

There wasn’t really anything I wanted to see in Fargo itself (as opposed to Moorhead), so I drove on through and out onto the Great Plains. I’m back in, “Oh, god, don’t anything step on my van! It’s really not a bug even though it looks as small as one!” country, and I am so happy about that. Oh, my gosh, I love the prairies. They’re so gorgeous.

And I got an interesting history lesson when I stopped at a rest area on my way to my stop for the night in Jamestown, too. I knew a little about tree claims, from reading my Laura Ingalls Wilder, but not this much. Too cool.

I don’t normally take photos of rest areas, but these cottonwoods were part of a tree claim.

Self-explanatory [g]. Interesting, huh?

I loved these clouds,. They almost look like they’re whirling, but they’re not. And look at the size of that *sky.*

Jamestown’s claim to fame is the world’s largest statue of a bison. I’ll go see if I can find it tomorrow morning.

Mirrored from M.M. Justus -- adventures in the supernatural Old West.

September 14: A Really Big Bison, and more history (are you tired of that yet? I’m not)

I found the World’s Biggest Bison this morning before I left Jamestown. It is a big bison, I’ll give it credit, but I saw the skull of an extinct bison this afternoon that I bet was bigger than that.

The world’s biggest bison. See the picnic table for scale?

That sky looks like a just-rolled-out package of quilt batting.

I find it amusingly practical that since they have to mow between the highway and the fence, anyway, why not bale it, too?

Another cute rest area, done up as an old-fashioned gas station.

This was at the North Dakota Heritage Center, which is another name for state history museum [g]. After driving the hundred miles, give or take, to Bismarck, North Dakota, the cute little state capitol, population a bit over 67,000, so it’s actually bigger than Olympia, my state capitol, which is just under 50,000. The difference, of course, is that Bismarck is the second largest city in North Dakota, and Olympia – isn’t.

Anyway, I think I lost control of my sentence there, and I’m not going to fix it. I’m just going to say that after lunch I spent over two hours at the museum, which was just renovated completely a couple of years ago, and the shiny new is wonderful. There’s a whole huge room on the pre-man history, dinosaurs and glaciers and all, and a whole huge room on the dozen or so tribes of Native Americans, with these neat audios of people speaking in their own languages, and a huge room on the history since the Europeans showed up. Which they did way earlier than I thought – a French explorer made it to what’s now North Dakota in the 1730s, although the story really didn’t pick up till Lewis and Clark in the first decade of the 1800s, and after that didn’t get real steam till after the Civil War.

Interesting stuff, though. Lots of stuff about homesteading and the railroads, among other things, and populism and farmers vs. the big city and so forth.

Woolly mammoth skeleton in the lobby of the North Dakota Heritage Center.

That’s one nasty looking fish, and the turtle to its right is *fifteen feet* long.

These are two extinct bison skulls (center and left) and a Bison bison (the scientific name) to skull to the right.

This is a wedding dress from just about the same year that Charley and Eliza got married in Repeating History, and the dress matches the description amazingly well except for the color. Eliza’s was more golden brown.

It never dawned on me that Montana and the Dakotas all became states the same year Washington did.

A lefse roller and lifter, just like the ones Karin used in True Gold!

After I finally dragged myself out of there, I drove past the strangest-looking state capitol I’ve ever seen. It looks like a condo building from LA or something, and its nickname is the Skyscraper of the Plains (it’s by far the tallest building in Bismarck, I’ll give it credit for that). Then I drove seven miles south of the town of Mandan (sort of Moorhead to Bismarck’s Fargo, except Mandan’s on the west side of the river) to Fort Abraham Lincoln State Park.

The Skyscraper of the Plains, aka why does that state capitol building look like Cockroach Central? (that’s a Vorkosigan reference, for those who don’t know)

Fort Lincoln was George Armstrong Custer’s last post before he headed off to the Little Bighorn and got himself and a bunch of his troops killed. It’s where his wife was when she found out he was dead, too. They’ve reconstructed his house there, but really, the most interesting part of Fort Lincoln State Park is the partial reconstruction of a 500-year-old Mandan Indian village. Five round houses (as opposed to tipis) on a slope near the Missouri River, two of which have exhibits inside them. The village was abandoned in the 17th century after the first of a number of smallpox epidemics basically wiped out 4/5ths of the population.

The houses are made of the same log and sod construction that the early pioneers built their houses from. Only the shape is different.

Oh, and there’s a wonderful, built-in-the-30s-by-the-CCC visitor center, too, with good exhibits.

The reproduction of Custer’s house at Fort Lincoln.

A Mandan earth lodge.

Inside a Mandan earth lodge.

By that point it was getting late, and I needed to find a place to sleep and hit a grocery store. I thought about camping at Fort Lincoln, but I hadn’t gone to the grocery store first, and it was awfully windy out there, too.

Maybe tomorrow night at Theodore Roosevelt National Park. If I get that far. I’m going about thirty miles north of here to Fort Mandan and the Knife River Indian Village National Historic Site first, because that’s where Lewis and Clark spent their first winter on the road (so to speak) and I’m curious.

The road inside Fort Lincoln state park, with trees beginning to turn.

Mirrored from M.M. Justus -- adventures in the supernatural Old West.