The biggest of the six — 178 miles of drowned river named for a Hidatsa-adopted woman whose homeland lies beneath it.
Sakakawea is the one mainstem reservoir with public survey bathymetry (ND Game & Fish, 2022–23). On the map its depth contours are adjusted to today's pool — depths shrink as the pool drops, and contours above the waterline disappear.
360°
This lake in 360° — 3,147 scenes · RM 1,557 →
Garrison Dam closed in 1953 and the rising pool destroyed the heart of the Fort Berthold Reservation: 152,000 acres of timbered bottomland, the towns of Elbowoods and Sanish, and the farms that had made the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara nearly self-sufficient. Roughly eighty percent of tribal membership was forced to relocate to the windswept uplands. The famous photograph of tribal chairman George Gillette weeping as the taking was signed in Washington says what the engineering reports do not.
The reservoir was named for Sakakawea, the young woman taken from the Knife River villages who walked to the Pacific with Lewis and Clark. The confluence country where the Little Missouri met the big river — homeland, garden, and gathering place — is under the bay that now carries its name. Paddling here means holding both truths: a magnificent inland sea, and the price at which it was made.
Terrain360 has captured roughly two-thirds of the mainstem in full 360° imagery. Tap any card to float that stretch in the viewer.
