When Lewis and Clark visited these parts in 1804-06, they brought along a blacksmith and a carpenter, a sign language interpreter and a mapmaker (Clark), but they did not bring an artist. It was a military reconnaissance mission into unknown and potentially dangerous territory and there was literally no room for nonessential personnel.

The captains needed every ounce of every man's thew and sinew to propel the Corps of Discovery to the Pacific Coast. I don't know how many Evinrude outboard motors would be required to propel a clunky keelboat and 30 tons of baggage up against the pre-dam currents of the Missouri River, but since not even steamboats existed in 1804, Lewis and Clark crossed the continent on behalf of President Jefferson on the backs and thighs of their doughty men. Even expedition commander Meriwether Lewis had to double up as specimen collector, celestial navigator, diplomat and field scientist.

A good visual artist was a luxury Lewis and Clark could not afford. Not that they weren't aware of the gap this left in their record of the journey. After he "discovered" the Great Falls of the Missouri River on June 13, 1805, Meriwether Lewis - who was an outstanding writer - did his best to pen a description of the principal waterfall of the Missouri River, "which has from the commencement of time been concealed from the view of civilized man."

Today's readers know he succeeded, but Lewis was convinced that he had failed to capture the essence of what he called "this truly magnificent and sublimely grand object." He lamented that he did not have the talent of a good landscape artist like the 17th century painter Salvator Rosa. Even at that moment, when he felt like a complete failure, Lewis does not say he wished he had brought an artist on the journey - he wished instead that he had artistic talent.

One generation after Lewis and Clark, the Enlightenment ethnographer Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied in Germany (1782-1867) visited the Upper Missouri. He was self-consciously traveling in the wake of Lewis and Clark, with their journals and maps in his rucksack. Unlike Jefferson's muscular proteges, he was a traveler, not an explorer. He was not opening new country but buying a ride on a fur-trade steamboat on a transportation infrastructure that was well established. Payload was not an issue. Cottonwood-powered steam was doing the work. He had the luxury of bringing an artist into the wildest country of the continent.

That artist was Swiss-born Karl Bodmer (1809-1893), arguably the greatest artist ever to paint the Missouri River and the Great Plains. You can see his artwork in books or online, or (better yet) at the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center at Washburn, where all 81 of Bodmer's magnificent aquatints are on display this year.

Last Sunday, I had the pleasure of taking a group of about 40 history lovers on a loopy bus journey to faraway Fort Union, the reconstructed American Fur Co. trade fort located on the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers, 25 miles southwest of Williston. Although Fort Union was at one time one of the most significant outposts in the North American fur trade, it is now isolated and lonely. It's one of those places you have to want to go to, because nobody just bumbles into it on the way to somewhere else. The giant, splayed-out rolling hills and breaks country around Fort Union is to the rest of North Dakota what North Dakota is to … say, New York or Massachusetts.

Our goal was to climb to something called Bodmer's Overlook, recently developed by the Fort Union Trading Post National Historic Site. At the summit of a bosomy hill a mile or so north of Fort Union, you can literally stand where Bodmer stood in 1833 when he painted his famous watercolor of the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers.

It was a gray but sometimes luminescent day, blousy, bordering on windy. Big sky - bigger than Montana's, for all the PR boasting of our bully neighbor to the west. The clouds pillowed the whole sky from horizon to horizon without a single blue break or oculus, big dramatic but not threatening clouds, clouds so prominent and beautiful that they force themselves into your view and refuse to be mere backdrop.

The sky toyed with drizzling a couple of times, but nobody got even slightly wet. The temperature was somewhere around 40 degrees - chilly but by no means cold or even disagreeable. The endlessly receding grass was still brown and gray after the brutal winter, but you could see (actually it was more like feeling than seeing) that it was about to pop into Ireland green.

On the bus from New Town to Fort Union, we kept saying, as helpless as Meriwether Lewis, "welcome to Bodmer's America." It's as if God borrowed Bodmer's aquatints when he fashioned the landscape.

It takes about 30 minutes to climb the trail to the summit. After establishing a base camp on the first knoll, we distributed a dram of chocolate to each pilgrim and made the final ascent.

Bodmer's Overlook is one of the half dozen most magical places in North Dakota. The vastness and openness and endlessness and treelessness and windsweptness and end of the universe-ness of that lavishly rolling grassland in that outlier corner of North Dakota is almost unbelievable.

Even to a North Dakotan who loves big open "empty" country, it's foreboding and a little frightening. It feels like it might swallow you up. In fact, it does swallow you up - in a way that makes you feel thrilled and apprehensive at the same time. You cannot be there and not be made aware of the "littleness of man," and temporaryness of your existence. It's a buffalo commons where even buffalo might glance around a little uneasy.

Everyone went silent as we gazed down on two of the world's great rivers as they folded into each other. Our corps of discovery moved instinctively together into a little cluster on that remote hill, which is at once the center of North America and the edge of nowhere. From where we stood, the fort on the brink of the river looked like a popsicle stick model in a diorama the size of Wyoming.

It was a perfect moment in a perfect place on a perfect day. I'm planning to return again and again as long as I can hike, and like Coleridge's ancient mariner, I've been singing the praises of Fort Union country to anyone who will listen.

This is why we live here.

(Clay Jenkinson is the director of the Dakota Institute, a Distinguished Visiting Humanities Scholar at BSC, and the lead scholar of the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University. You can reach him at Jeffysage@aol.com.)