So often when we think of Native Americans who lived in the American Old West, we see pictures of tipis, bison, and soldiers in forts. What we’ve been learning, and are going to learn in this post, is that many tribes we’re seeing in these posts basically stay in one place unless they go out hunting bison in the spring and fall. Another group of Natives we learned about, the Eastern Cherokee Nation, who lived in the Smokey Mountains in North Carolina and had a variety of homes that fit in with the land where they lived. But today we’re learning about the Mandan who lived in the eastern part of North Dakota.
Welcome to the Mandan Nation.
The Mandan were known as successful hunters and farmers, savvy and peaceful merchant traders, who were brave in defense of their homes.
In the 1930s, a group of archeologists came here and dug in the ground until they found what has become the Slant Village. Members of the CCC were brought in to create the replicas of the earth lodges that we saw in the previous post.
the village
Inside the walls, about 85 extended-family earth lodges were constructed. It appears that each of them was round, except for the one large public building called the Medicine Lodge.
The lodges opening on the plaza were probably the homes of the prominent community members. Some evidence shows that 13 lodges circled the plaza, perhaps the 13 traditional clans and the families that led them. The rest of the village was more crowded with lodges, public garbage piles, and winding streets.
The shrine commemorated the protection that Lone Man offered the Mandan during a Great Flood that covered the earth.
From earliest times the Mandan protected their villages from attack by constructing defensive fortifications. Ditches were reportedly 15 feet wide, 15 feet deep, and backed with 15 feet high palisade walls made of cottonwood and other timbers.
I was curious about the number 15 and if it were important to the Mandan. Wikipedia told me, “Yes, the number 15 was significant to the Mandan, as they had a ceremonial calendar that included 15 distinct months. This structure was important for their agricultural and cultural practices.”
Mandan paid attention to public sanitation and so were pretty clean. Garbage was, of course, organic and biodegradable. It was placed in midden piles which, when placed near the village walls, may have served a dual purpose as ramparts to raise defenders above any attackers.
Women were coming in from the gardens with produce to prepare for immediate meals, or storage. Men and boys would take up positions on the top of the earth lodges, watching the women work or perhaps planning a fall buffalo hunt. Children and dogs would play in the streets. The large plaza could be the scene of several games. The village was alive.
the river
The Missouri River was the center of the Mandan universe. Everything good came from the river. It provided drinking and cooking water, of course, and water to keep young plants from dying too easily in dry years.
In the spring something else floated between the ice floes—buffalo. Francis Chardon wrote this on April 1, 1836.
“Ice running very thick in the River. The Indians had great Sport in catching buffalo that was floating down on the ice—a few were still living having taken their Station of large masses of ice—traveled very quickly down Stream. But the greater part that was hauled on Shore had been previously drowned.”
“They would boldly embark on the first piece of floating ice that approached the Shore, and Springing from piece to piece—or swimming when the distance was too great to leap, would generally succeed in fastning a cord around the horns—and towing the carcase to shore.”
the gardens
Village women broke ground in spring for gardens below the village in the fertile bottom land along the river. Periodic flooding regularly restored the soil’s nutrients. The gardens were arranged in intensively-gardened family plots.
In fall, after the corn was harvested and the kernels removed from the cob for storage, empty corncobs were stacked in a pile for burning. If the wind didn’t blow and the fire burned properly, a film coating was left on the ashes. That was collected and rolled into balls of a spice much preferred by the Mandan to the alkalai salts found around sloughs and small lakes in the region.
Sunflowers rimmed the gardens, providing a boundary between families and preventing, the gardeners thought, hybridization of the various varieties of corn.
Large family gardens filled the Missouri River bottoms when On-a-Slant was occupied. Their varieties of corn included sweet corn, flour corn, and parched corn that popped when heated.
They harvested wild prairie turnips, choke cherries, buffalo berries, June berries, wild onions, and much more.
intertribal trade
Trade is incredibly ancient. Many of the items could be hand-carried and traded around the continent for thousands of years. Trade became more regular and economically important when villages like On-a-Slant were founded.
Crow, Cheyenne, Cree, and Assiniboine, among other nations, came to Mandan villages regularly to trade. Traveling tribes brought interesting things like dressed hides, feathers, exotic stones, and shells to the Mandan and took corn, squash, and beans home with them. Starting in the 1600s, other interesting items began showing up in Mandan villages, including items from Europe.
Glass beads, metal tools, and European clothing were carried to the villages by Indian middlemen. Of all the new things from Europe, the two most significant were horses and guns. Guns from Canada and horses brought north from Spanish holdings were traded in the 1700s at On-a-Slant, with the Mandan benefiting from the exchange.
earth lodge
Earth lodges were home to extended families of 12 to 15 people. Typically the woman who owned the lodge lived there with her husband, her unmarried sons, her married daughters, and their husbands and children. An elderly parent might also live with them.
Not every man had multiple wives, but there was a practical reason to do so. There were twice as many women as men, due to the dangers men faced as hunters and warriors.
The ground around and within the lodges was honeycombed with large cache pits, which were the Mandan root cellars. Archeology reveals that a single lodge might contain 7 or more pits, 5-7 feet deep, some in use and some probably forgotten, holding foodstuffs, garbage, or even human remains.
planning for trouble
On-a-Slant Village was a planned community. Set above the floodplain on the west bank of the Missouri River, it was settled around 1575 by families from 3 neighboring Mandan villages. It was the southernmost town of the Mandan Nation at that time, and it was built with an eye for defense.
Only on the western side was it necessary to improve defenses with a fortification ditch 600 feet long, dug by bone and stone tools in a massive public works project. The ditch was backed by a high wooden wall.
The Mandan were known as a peaceful people who were quite brave when attacked. In other words, their reputation was they didn’t look for trouble, but they knew what to do when trouble came. Mandan villages were protected by wooden walls backing natural terrain and man-made ditches.
Almost every man over 15 years of age was a warrior until he was too old to fight. Even then, older men would help protect the village when the younger men were hunting or on a war party.
The weapons of war included bows and arrows, lances, knives, and a combination bow-lance, apparently unique to the Mandan. Around 1740, guns became fairly available through Canadian fur traders and Assinibonine middlemen.
the people
Every Mandan village was similar. They lived in earth lodges and had gardens.
honoring the dead
“When the scaffolds on which the bodies rest, decay and fall to the ground, the nearest relations having buried the rest of the bones, take the skulls, which are perfectly bleached and purified, and place them in circles of an hundred or more on the prairie, placed at equal distances apart (some eight or nine inches from each other), with the faces all looking to the centre; where they are religiously protected and preserved in their precise positions from year to year, as objects of religious and affectionate veneration.”
the Mandan Ambassador
President Jefferson asked Lewis and Clark to bring chiefs of the Mandan and Hidatsa to Washington. Other chiefs refused, citing the danger of traveling through enemy warriors, but Sheheke [or Big White] of the Mandan agreed to go, taking along his wife and two-year-old son. Sheheke counciled [met and talked with] along the way with the Arikara and Cheyenne, received a U.S. military uniform in St. Louis, and traveled on to Virginia, where he probably visited Jefferson’s home of Monticello.
I was curious about what happened to Chief Sheheke. Wikipedia said, “He returned to the upper Missouri. He had survived the smallpox epidemic of 1781, but in 1812 Chief Sheheke was killed in a battle with Hidatsa [their neighbors].” I wonder what this battle was all about; could it be because the Mandan chief had become friends with Lewis and Clark and had gone to meet President Jefferson?
Here’s what I found out about the death of Sheheke from Native American Roots: “Sheheke was killed in 1812 in a battle between the Mandan and Hidatsa. The Hidatsa, under the leadership of Le Borgne, considered themselves to be allies of the English, while the Mandan, particularly Sheheke, were closely allied with the Americans. Some historians feel that this battle should be considered a part of the larger War of 1812.” Interesting.
This post ends our time with the Mandan and the expedition at Fort Mandan. The Corps of Discovery really made a good impression with the Mandan, who helped them survive that winter and gave them information that they needed for their trip ahead.
Our next stop takes us away from the Lewis & Clark trip to Medora, ND, in the southwest corner of the state to Theodore Roosevelt’s time in that area around the turn of the 20th century. President Roosevelt’s Presidential Library just opened up and we got to go!
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