North Dakota History in Photos: Mandan

This story was originally published in the Bismarck Tribune on June 29, 1981. By STAN STELTER, Bismarck Tribune

Mandan's founding generally is linked to the growth of the railroad westward in the late 1800's, but its roots are much deeper.

The area was once occupied by ancestors of the Mantani, or Mandan Indians, who reportedly occupied the land hundreds of years ago, apparently moving in from the southeastern United States.

The Indians had a sedentary type of culture and maintained a life of hunting, gardening and fishing along the Missouri River bottomlands.

As a result of attacks from a nomadic tribe, the Mantani — a Dakota word for riverbank dwellers — began drawing together near the  confluence of the Heart and Missouri rivers about 1600.

One historian estimates the Mandan population at the mouth of the Heart in 1700 at 8,000. Historians say one of those settlements was made by Good Fur Robe. It was called "The Crying Hill" because a nearby hilltop — reportedly the hilltop in the eastern portion of present-day Mandan — was used as a mourning place.

The village also was known as "Two Faced Stone" for the outcropping of granite, serving as the source for a mystical experience by the medicine man. In 1738, in one of his visions, he foresaw visitors from the north, according to historical accounts.

That coincides with the earliest recorded visit to the area by a white man, Sieure de la Verendrye, and his son. While exploring the Louisiana Purchase territory, the Frenchman arrived in the area thought to be the present site of the Amoco Oil Co. refinery on Mandan's northeast edge.

More than a hundred years passed, however, before white settlement began.

The settlement was spurred by the establishment of Fort McKeen and Fort Abraham Lincoln in 1872-73 south of the city's eventual site. The forts attracted traders, settlers and others.

By 1873, Bismarck had become the western-most extension of the Northern Pacific railroad. Railroad survey crews began working west of the Missouri River, and people began looking in that direction to settle.

Robert Henry, a trapper and hunter who picked up work at Fort McKeen, is said to have been the first Mandan settler in 1872, although he actually lived north of the infantry fort along the Heart. Other accounts say the first dwelling in Mandan was built by a military man, Maj. William N. Mitchell.

However, it was Frederic F. Gerard, a trader and later a scout for George Custer, who is considered to be the city's founding father, staking a claim in the area of the village in 1872. When that turned out to be Northern Pacific property, he later purchased 40 acres in the settlement, and that ultimately became Gerard's Addition in south Mandan.

Homesteaders began arriving about 1877, some settling along the Missouri north of present Mandan, near what is known as the Rock Haven boat landing.

One early settler and subsequent Morton County commissioner, Elijah Boley, arrived from Iowa, saw much potential in the new settlement and suggested it could become the "Omaha of the Northwest."

There was speculation about where the railroad would cross the Missouri; Boley thought it would be about three miles north of the present city, and so he staked his claim at that point.

As it turned out, the Northern Pacific first laid tracks across the Missouri ice farther south in 1879, and a bridge spanning the river was finished three years later.

Mandan's naming is tied to the railroad. Credit is given to Gen. T.L. Rosser, a former Confederate officer and the Northern Pacific's engineer for this division, who reportedly made the decision on a station-naming trip in 1873.

John Rea, a federal land agent and newspaperman, accompanied Rosser and later claimed it was his repeated use of the name in news dispatches eastward that made the name stick.

But the use of that name wasn't accepted unanimously. In July 1878, the village took on the first of several names when the sod post office was dubbed Morton, corresponding to the county being named in honor of an Indiana governor during the Civil War.

Then, in October 1878, a group representing the Lincoln Townsite Co., which was developing a site about two miles south, proposed the name Lincon to the new county commission, and the name was accepted.

But the site didn't develop, despite offers of land and a log courthouse if the commissioners located the county seat there.

Finally, the county commission — including Gerard, Boley and Chris Nolen — voted to name the county seat Mandan on December 14, 1878. Several weeks later, commissioners set the county seat site about where the Amoco refinery is now.

One other name, Cushman, was interjected later that year by the post office for its facility at the railroad station, but the name was changed to Mandan by that fall.

As with other "railroad towns," the platting of the townsite was done by the Northern Pacific, being approved by the NP's board of directors in March 1879.

The town site, as described in February 1879 by The Tribune, "is beautifully situated at the base of a semi-circular range of hills which form a natural barrier against the wind and storms on the north and northeast sides while the heavy belt of trees on the Little Heart gives ample protection" to the south.

Mandan then had a population of 230.

By April, Mandan boasted of 123 frames and houses, with more under construction.

The little village was on its way.

In February 1881, the settlement filed for incorporation, and the amending act of the Dakota Territory Legislature incorporating the village became effective February 24.

This story was originally published in the Bismarck Tribune on June 29, 1981. By STAN STELTER, Bismarck Tribune

Mandan grew rapidly after the trains crossed the Missouri River, extending the Northern Pacific's reach westward.

In 1879, the city's population was reported at 300; by 1882 it was 1,500, and a year later, between 2,000 and 2,500.

The city's early development was influenced by Eastern capitalists, including a group called the Boston Syndicate.

The Syndicate and the railroad played important roles in shaping Mandan's early economic development.

Many of the NP workers lived in the Mandan House, a boarding house on the east end of town. At the west end was the Endicott Building, the work of Henry Endicott, a member of the Syndicate.

Records from that time aren't clear, but it seems the Syndicate was organized by Henry Endicott, one of three well-known Endicotts from Massachusetts.

He was a manufacturer and capitalist, and, therefore, he was the most likely of the three Endicotts to invest in Mandan, a Western boom town.

Other Syndicate members included Edward Clopp, William B. Crosby and Edward C. Turner.

They bought two quarters of land in southwest Mandan. The land had been homesteaded by Judson P. Lansing in 1881, but the group acquired it through a series of transactions and platted it into the Southside Addition.

According to local historians, the Boston men planned to build new homes on every block and allow residents to purchase them on monthly installments. Those buying a lot had to improve it, and the company itself would use its proceeds for additional improvements.

But that part of the Syndicate's scheme didn't work; the land eventually was sold back to the two men it had been purchased from.

Growth continued in the village, which now stretched for a mile along the NP tracks.

By 1883, Mandan had some 350 buildings, including large businesses, several churches, schools, a public hall for concerts and other entertainment and a depot.

The value of city improvements, according to a "Guide to the Northern Pacific Railroad and its Allied Lines" of 1883, was $240,000 in 1882. The city's taxable valuation had risen from $160,000 in 1881 to $1 million  in 1883.

Several major businesses were under way early in the town's life.

The first newspaper in Mandan, The Mandan Criterion, came out May 24, 1879. The publisher was Harry Robinson, who moved to the settlement from Wisconsin. It's not known how long the paper was published.

F.H. Ertel began publishing the weekly Mandan Pioneer in November 1881, and it later became a daily. The town later gained another weekly newspaper, the Mandan Times, but it lasted only a short time.

Also starting in 1881 were the First National Bank, which operated out of a "fine building" on Main Street; Cary Real Estate Co., originated by George and Ferd Bingenheimer.

The impressive Inter-Ocean Hotel, which was to become a landmark in the city, was built at the corner of Dilworth Avenue and Main Street, the present site of the Lewis and Clark Hotel. The three-story, brick structure was called the "finest hotel in the Northwest" when it was finished in 1882.

Mandan was the site for other ventures also. Because the area had abundant deposits of clay suitable for bricks, the Syndicate in 1884 set up a brick-making plant in south Mandan. It employed 30 persons, and its daily quota was 30,000 bricks.

The Boston group also built a spur railroad track from the main line south through the platted section of the town to the Heart River. That was to serve as an incentive for another group planning a flour mill.

The mill, completed on the banks of the Heart in 1885, was equipped with some of the most advanced machinery of the time.

It had a 200-barrel daily production capacity. It was operated by a miller brought from Minneapolis who, according to Mandan historian Sarah Tostevin, planned to make the flour of the Mandan Roller Mill "equal to 'Pillsbury's Best.'"

Wheat for the mill came from the immediate area and was said to be some of the best anywhere. The grounds of the mill were developed, with some 500 trees planted and walks laid.

The mill was razed in the 1960s.

The first horse-drawn street car in Dakota Territory reportedly operated in Mandan, and it was the work of the Syndicate. Tracks were laid on the sout side of Main Street to the corner of Sixth Avenue Northwest, where they crossed the NP tracks to the Syndicate's southside residential area.

It isn't known exactly when the service started, but the last run of the street car was on February 18, 1882.

At that time, Sixth Avenue Northwest, which became one of the city's main thoroughfares, was described as a big ditch, gouged out by rains and crossed at intervals by planking.

With the opening of the NP's bridge across the Missouri in 1882, Mandan took on a special significance — it had the only bridge across the Missouri in Dakota Territory.

"Mandan's commanding position gives it an absolute certainty of a growth commensurate with the growth of the extensive farming and stock-raising region...," wrote The Northwest Magazine, in 1888.

"Of this region, it is now the trade capital and as such it will never have a rival." The magazine noted that the city's trade area stretched 100 miles west, 50 miles northand 40 miles south.

The magazine suggested Mandan could be compared to Omaha, Nebraska, in terms of its location and potential.

Mandan's early growth coincided with what has been described as the Great Dakota Boom, when North Dakota's population jumped from 16,000 in 1878 to 191,000 by 1890.

Population trends changed, however. Mandan's population, which reached 2,500 by 1883, had dropped back to 1,328 by 1890. Part of that may be attributed to the departure of railroad crews and early speculators.

As a new century opened, the city, in the eyes of a railroad official returning to the city, had lost its "frontier" appearance.

In the 1880's, Mandan's streets were dusty and ungraded. Its only street lights were lamps in front of the Inter-Ocean. Wagonloads of buffalo bones could be seen sitting on Main Street, waiting to be shipped out for use as fertilizer.

But by 1909, Mandan had become a "city of homes," according to the railroad man.

An indication of its initiation into the modern era was the adoption of the new city commission form of government in 1908.