(Photo submitted by North Dakota Historical Society) This historic photo shows the ice blocks that formed in the streets of Mandan after the Missouri River flooded in 1881 and then froze.
The Missouri River provides great beauty when it flows within its usual course. But when the murmuring waters of the Big Muddy rise to become a torrent, the peaceful river becomes a woeful hazard.
This year’s flood will go down in history, but it may be put into context by examining newspaper archives and congressional records of a monster flood from the deep past – the fearful Missouri River Flood of 1881.
The winter of 1880 to 1881 brought unprecedented heavy snows to Dakota Territory. That winter became legendary; author Laura Ingalls Wilder named it the “Long Winter.” Blizzards began in October and hit fiercely again and again.
The mountains in Montana were covered in deep snow by February when unusually warm weather melted the snowpack and the ice on the river at Fort Benton in the north central part of present-day Montana. The Yellowstone River at Fort Buford broke up by Feb. 13.
The problem was that the Missouri River was still frozen solid at Bismarck and farther south. The river ice at Mandan and Bismarck was 42 inches thick.
By mid-March, the upstream water began flowing over the ice – not disturbing it at all – and flooded the bottomlands below the river bluffs.
On March 31, the ice jammed near Fort Lincoln and created an ice “gorge,” backing up the river toward the village of Mandan. The river rose more than 10 feet in six hours, rising to 31 feet above flood stage.
Bismarck was not affected. Most homes were built higher than the 31-foot flood peak. But Mandan became an icy mess.
So swift were the floodwaters that Mandan’s residents had to flee from their homes, wading in waist-deep water and seeking shelter in the higher bluffs above the town. Men, women and children grabbed blankets for warmth and left all else behind in their haste. That night, the temperature plunged to 8 degrees.
“Huge pieces of dirty-faced ice, thirty-six inches thick would rise up and fall down” as the floodwaters coursed through the streets of Mandan, smashing and crashing into all objects and buildings in its way,” according to a report published at the time in the Bismarck Tribune.
The ice blockade of the river near Fort Lincoln continued for five more days, finally breaking up April 5.
Residents of Mandan tried to return to their homes, but the river had left “six feet of ice in the streets and all over Mandan,” according to a Minneapolis Tribune report at the time.
Inside the houses, several inches of mud and water had frozen solid. A “vast field of ice five-feet thick” covered the entire distance of three miles from Mandan’s center to the usual riverbank. It was estimated that it would take until June for all that ice to melt.
Seventy-five Mandan residents took shelter in a local church, others moved in with families in houses higher on the bluffs. Provisions grew so scarce that “every cow, hog or chicken” had been killed for food.
The damage was enormous. All the railway ties for the extension of the Northern Pacific Railway to the west had floated downriver, as had massive piles of firewood cut for steamboats.
In South Dakota, Iowa and Nebraska, the flood of 1881 became known as the worst in history to that time.
Mandan, due to its resilient citizenry, soon recovered from the flood. And the Northern Pacific Railway built its great bridge across the Missouri River, making Mandan an important railway town with a roundhouse.
Famous photographer F. Jay Haynes took a photo of the massive river ice floes lodged in the streets of Mandan, an image that captures the power of that terrible 1881 flood.
In the Twentieth Century, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers sought to tame the Missouri River by means of six huge dams. As the Great Flood of 2011 has shown, even the “tamed” Missouri was capable of causing severe damage.
-Steve Hoffbeck is a freelance writer for the Great Plains Examiner and a professor of history at Minnesota State University at Moorhead.
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