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The
first steamboat to journey to the Upper Missouri, the Yellow Stone,
arrived at Fort Clark in 1832 and delivered 1,500 gallons of liquor and other
trade goods. It returned to St. Louis carrying 100 packs of beaver pelts and
bison robes from the fort. Important visitors to the site, such as artists Karl
Bodmer and George Catlin and German scientist and explorer Prince Alexander
Philipp Maximilian of Weid-Neuweid, also recorded life and death at the site
in vivid detail.
Although steamboat traffic was important in transporting goods and visitors to the site, it also brought disease. On June 19, 1837, the steamboat St. Peters docked at Fort Clark carrying passengers infected with smallpox. Soon the disease swept through the Mandan village, killing about 90 percent of the inhabitants. In mid-August, at the height of the smallpox epidemic, the survivors fled to join the Hidatsa near the mouth of the Knife River, abandoning the village at Fort Clark.
Although also devastated by the 1837 epidemic, approximately 50 percent of the Mandans' neighbors, the Arikara, survived. In 1838 they moved into the abandoned Mandan village to trade at Fort Clark and to grow their crops. Tragically, an outbreak of cholera in 1851 and another of smallpox in 1856 further reduced their population. The Arikara used the village as their summer home until they moved to Star Village near Fort Berthold in 1862.
Meanwhile,
another fur trade post, Primeau's Post, had been constructed on the south side
of the Arikara village in 1850 by a competitor, Harvey, Primeau, an Company
of St. Louis. The fort was located between Fort Clark and the Arikara village.
Charles Primeau, a former employee of the American Fur Company, started the
competing company.
After the south half of Fort Clark burned in 1860, the owners purchased Primeau's Post, which they operated until 1861. Later that year, Primeau's Post and the Arikara village were abandoned after an attack by the Dakota. Passing steamboats scavenged firewood from the abandoned fort until at least 1865.