Trailing Lewis and Clark

The Missouri River northwest of Bismarck, North Dakota, is not the same river explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark saw in 1805, even though it has the same name. Much has changed in two centuries. When Lewis and Clark wintered with the Mandans in 1804-05, the tribe was still reeling from the smallpox epidemics that had devastated the Upper Missouri in 1780-1781 and 1801-02 (in 1837-38 yet another smallpox epidemic would all but wipe out this tribe that had once controlled much of the