Lewis & Clark Among The Indians 4. The Mandan Winter

As the fall days of 1804 grew colder and shorter, the Lewis and Clark expedition struggled toward what has been called "the keystone of the Upper Missouri region"—the Mandan and Hidatsa villages. [1] The American explorers were only the latest in a long series of traders and travelers making the journey to the earth lodge villages along the Missouri. The Mandan and Hidatsa towns were the center of northern plains trade, attracting Indian and white merchants over vast distances. At trading times, especially during the late summer and early fall, the villages were crowded with the Crows , Assiniboins , Cheyennes , Kiowas, Arapahoes, and, after midcentury, with whites representing the North West Company, the Hudson's Bay Company, and St. Louis interests. In the arena of frontier culture, few places gave more evidence of the varied objects and diverse peoples making up North America than the Mandan and Hidatsa towns. The winter at Fort Mandan would expose Lewis and Clark to much of that variety and diversity. The winter would try the expedition's diplomatic skill and expand its ethnographic horizons. At the same time, the Mandan and Hidatsa people would get their first long look at the coming wave of American traders and bureaucrats. Those long Dakota months were an apprenticeship during which each group probed the other and formed lasting impressions.

A traveler coming up the Missouri from St. Louis in 1804 would have found five Indian settlements—two Mandan and three Hidatsa—strung out along the river in what is now central North Dakota. Past the Heart River, the first town was the Mandan village known to Lewis and Clark as Matootonha. More correctly named Mitutanka, this village was located on the west bank of the Missouri. Clark described Mitutanka as "situated on an eminance of about 50 feet above the water in a handsome plain." [2] Like its sister village across the river, Mitutanka was built by the Mandans sometime around 1787. In most of their notes, the explorers referred to Mitutanka as the "lower" or "first" Mandan village. Ordway reported that the village had about forty earth lodges. Because Mitutanka was the closest Mandan village to the expedition's winter quarters, the explorers became very familiar with both the town and its leading chiefs. Sheheke, known to Lewis and Clark as Big White, was the most prominent civil chief in Mitutanka. The captains named Kagohhami, or Little Raven, also a civil chief, as Second Chief.

Farther up the Missouri, directly north of Mitutanka and on the east bank of the river, was the second Mandan settlement. Throughout the expedition's records this town of about forty or fifty earth lodges was called Rooptahee. Rooptahee was a mispronunciation of Nuptadi, one of the four Mandan subtribes existing before the 1781 smallpox epidemic. Lewis and Clark often called Rooptahee the "upper" or "second" Mandan village. Because it was the home of Posecopsahe, or Black Cat, the civil chief designated Grand Mandan Chief by the explorers, Rooptahee took on special significance for the expedition's diplomacy. Cargarnomakshe, or Raven Man Chief, was made Second Chief of Rooptahee by the captains.

Directly across the Missouri from Rooptahee was a Hidatsa village so distinct from the two other Hidatsa towns that virtually every European visitor noted the differences. Known as Mahawha, the village was established about 1787 by the Awaxawi Hidatsas. Built on a terrace overlooking the confluence of the Knife and the Missouri rivers, Mahawha had about fifty warriors in 1804. The captains knew these people as the Amahami, Ahaharway, or Wattasoon Indians and always distinguished them in their records from the two other Hidatsa groups. Although the Awaxawis were linguistically distinct from their Hidatsa neighbors on the Knife River, they were not a separate tribe as Lewis and Clark believed. The Awaxawis called themselves Ahaharways or Ahnahaways; Wattasoon was their Mandan name. French traders nicknamed them the "soulier" Indians and Lewis and Clark occasionally termed the Awaxawis as the Shoe or Moccasin people. The captains had some contact with the Awaxawi Hidatsas of Mahawha through Tatuckcopinreha, or White Buffalo Robe Unfolded, the most prominent village chief.

Along the Knife River, Lewis and Clark found the two major Hidatsa settlements. On the right bank of the Knife, about a mile from the confluence of the Missouri, was the town Lewis and Clark called the "First Minnetaree Village," or "the little village of the Menitarras." Built about 1787 by Awatixa Hidatsas and home to a substantial number of Mandan families as well, the village was properly known as Metaharta. Village residents were sometimes named in expedition journals as Minnetarees Metaharta or the Minnetarees of the Willows. Metaharta has special significance for the history of the expedition since it was there that the Shoshoni woman Sacagawea and the North West Company trader Toussaint Charbonneau lived before joining the Corps of Discovery. Leadership in the village, as recognized by Lewis and Clark, came from First Chief Ompsehara, or Black Moccasin, and Second Chief Ohharh, or Little Fox. Metaharta would continue to be an important Hidatsa village of some forty lodges until its destruction, along with Mahawha's, by a Sioux raid in the spring of 1834.

The most remote of the Knife River Hidatsa villages, both in terms of distance and expeditionary diplomacy, was Menetarra, generally known in the journals as the "second Minnetaree Village." Established sometime before 1780 by the Hidatsas-proper, Menetarra was the largest of the Hidatsa towns, boasting some 450 warriors and 130 earth lodges during the Lewis and Clark era. Menetarra's assets were not only substantial population and considerable military force but exceptional leadership in the person of Le Borgne, or One Eye. [3]

Observing Mandan and Hidatsa villages during the summer of 1806, Alexander Henry the Younger described them as "a cluster of molehills or muskrat cabins." The trader explained that on closer examination "the nearly circular huts are placed very irregularly; some so close to each other as scarcely to leave a foot-passage, others again at a distance of 20 to 30 feet apart. But about the center of each village is an open space of about four acres, around which the huts are regularly built at equal distances, fronting the open space." [4] For both Mandan and Hidatsa households the village was the focus of important political, economic, and ceremonial activities. In many ways the villages can be best understood as a collection of households all acting together to advance the welfare of the family, the clan, and the village.

Just as the medicine lodge was the focal point for Arikara villages, the center of a Mandan village was the sacred cedar post and the open plaza around it. The cedar post represented Lone Man, the primary Mandan culture hero. On the north edge of the plaza was the large medicine or Okipa lodge. Hanging on poles outside the Okipa lodge were effigies representing various spirits. The Mandan villages seen by Lewis and Clark consisted of about forty to fifty domestic lodges arranged around the plaza. The social position of each household determined the location of lodges. Those families with important ceremonial responsibilities and those who owned powerful bundles lived near the plaza while less prominent households occupied lodges farther away. Mandan and Hidatsa earth lodges were usually occupied for anywhere between seven to twelve years. Each lodge housed from five to sixteen persons with the average number in a Mandan lodge being ten persons. [5] At the time of Lewis and Clark, Mandan and Hidatsa villages were defended by log palisades.

These villages, so familiar from the descriptions of explorers and traders like Lewis and Clark and Alexander Henry the Younger and nineteenth-century artists like George Catlin and Karl Bodmer, were in fact only part of the settled experience of the Upper Missouri villagers. They divided their time between large, permanent summer lodge towns and smaller winter camps. The winter lodges, built in wooded bottoms to escape the harsh winter storms, were neither large nor especially well constructed. Lewis and Clark did not comment on these winter camps, and it is possible that fear of Sioux attack kept many Mandans and Hidatsas within the protection of the more substantial summer villages. Looking down on the towns from a high riverbank, David Thompson was reminded of "so many large hives clustered together." [6] And so must they have seemed to Lewis and Clark seven years later.

Lewis and Clark were not the first white men to see the Mandan and Hidatsa villages and their surrounding fields of corn, beans, squash, and sunflowers. The first recorded European visit to the villages had occurred on the afternoon of December 3, 1738, when Pierre Gaultier de Varennes de La Vérendrye, accompanied by French traders and Assiniboin guides, entered a Mandan "fort" near the Heart River. Attracted by tales of fair-skinned, red-haired natives who lived in large towns and possessed precious metals, La Vérendrye had made the long journey from Fort La Reine on the Assiniboine River to see those mysterious people. Although La Vérendrye did not find the fabled white Indians, he did record the first European impressions of the Mandan lifeway. That record, taken along with evidence preserved from the 1742–43 visit of La Vérendrye's sons to the region, offers the picture of prosperous earth lodge people living along the Missouri River near the Heart and already enjoying French and Spanish goods. [7]

With the disruptions caused by French and English conflicts that finally cost France its Canadian empire, the tenuous foreign contacts with the Mandan villages were lost, at least to the written record. There is no doubt that European goods continued to enter the Upper Missouri carried by native middlemen. In the second half of the eighteenth century, some Canadians were beginning to reside in the village as "tenant traders." These were men like the little-known Montreal trader Mackintosh, who visited the Mandans in late 1773, and the long-term residence Pierre Menard, who came in 1778. Mackintosh and Menard were among the last to see the Upper Missouri village Indians in the days of high prosperity before the devastating epidemic of 1781. In the years after 1781, weakened by disease and threatened by Sioux bands, the Mandans abandoned the Heart River villages. Their move north was toward the Knife River and an uneasy alliance with the Hidatsas. It was there that James Mackay found them when he came from the Qu'Appelle River to trade in 1787. Throughout the 1790s, contacts with both Canadian and St. Louis traders increased as men like Jacques D'Eglise, René Jusseaume, and John Evans waged economic war to gain control of the Mandan-Hidatsa trade. The presence of these men and their goods did not immediately threaten the well-being of the villagers. Quite the contrary, the trade items (especially guns and ammunition) strengthened the villagers against their Sioux and Arikara enemies. The traders were simply adopted as fictional relatives, a practice first noted by La Vérendrye and surely employed long before 1738 with Indian middlemen. [8]

The Mandan and Hidatsa villages have been aptly described as "the central market place of the Northern Plains." [9] It was this great Missouri River country store that attracted so many Europeans, as well as Indians. The transactions at this crossroads of cultures and goods touched the lives of people far from central North Dakota and in turn conditioned the Mandans ' and the Hidatsas' relations with all outsiders. At that market one could find Spanish horses and mules brought by the Cheyennes , destined for Assiniboin herds; fancy Cheyenne leather clothing for Mandan dandies; English trade guns and ammunition eagerly sought by villagers and nomads alike; and the ever present baskets of corn, beans, squash, and tobacco upon which Mandan and Hidatsa economic strength was built. Forming the upper exchange center in the Missouri Trade System, the Mandan and Hidatsa villagers served as brokers in an international economic and cultural trade network that faced in three directions and stretched over thousands of miles.

Like their Arikara neighbors, the Mandan and Hidatsa villages shared an important western connection with the Cheyennes , Crow , and Arapahoes. These nomadic plains people brought a wide variety of meat products as well as luxury leather goods to the Mandan-Hidatsa market. But in the eyes of all villagers, the most valuable commodity brought from the West and Southwest were horses and mules. Just as the Arikaras sought those animals to supply the needs of the Sioux , so did Mandan and Hidatsa traders bargain for them to satisfy the requirements of their Assiniboin and Cree customers. Reaching east, the Knife River brokers also did some trading with Sioux bands who brought buffalo meat and some manufactured goods from the Dakota Rendezvous. However, the close trade ties between the Teton Sioux and the Arikaras and the frequent raids that alliance visited on the Mandan and Hidatsa towns made the Sioux connection somewhat risky.

If the Sioux could not be relied upon to bring European goods to the Knife River villages as they did to the Grand River towns, the Mandan and Hidatsa people had to find another and more reliable source of supply. So the third face of the Mandan-Hidatsa system looked north to the many bands of Crees and Assiniboins . Long before Lewis and Clark, the Crees and Assiniboins had been carrying English and French goods to the Mandan and Hidatsa towns to exchange for agricultural produce, tobacco, and horses. When La Vérendrye visited the Mandans in 1738, he saw the Mandan- Assiniboin trade in full swing. The French explorer, impressed with the Mandans ' business skill, wrote that the villagers "knew well how to profit by it in selling their grains, tobacco, skins and colored plumes which they knew the Assiniboin prize highly." As testimony to the penetration of European goods into the northern plains well before the middle of the eighteenth century, La Vérendrye observed that the most sought-after merchandise brought by the Assiniboins were "guns, axes, kettles, powder, bullets, knives, [and] awls." [10]

Whenever Lewis and Clark analyzed an Indian trade system, they always thought in terms of the distribution of political power in that network and possible future competition with American merchants. Regarding the Missouri Trade System, they believed that the Teton Sioux needed to be weaned away from North West Company traders and brought into the sphere of the St. Louis interests. Beyond that, Lewis and Clark were always eager to cast the Sioux as colonial masters exercising political and economic dominance over the innocent and vulnerable Arikaras. The message was simple. The political and economic power of the Sioux needed to be broken and the honest villagers freed so that they could participate in the new American trade system.

Lewis and Clark's diplomacy attempted to impose the same simplistic model on the Mandan and Hidatsa trade with Assiniboins and Crees. Those tribes provided manufactured goods from English and Canadian sources that might be supplied by American merchants. Knowing there was often tension between the villagers and their northern trading partners, Lewis and Clark used such strife as a pretext to lecture Mandan chiefs on the reasons for abandoning the Assiniboins and Crees in favor of St. Louis traders. What the captains did not grasp was that the merchandise exchanged between the villagers and the northern peoples—food products and horses—did not in the least interest Americans increasingly obsessed with beaver pelts. Despite this, Clark still told Mandan chiefs, "You know yourselves that you are compelled to put up with little insults from the Christinoes [Cree] and Ossinaboins because if you go to war with those people, they will prevent the traders in the North from bringing you guns, powder, and ball and by that means distress you very much." Clark was determined to cast the Mandans and the Hidatsas in the same role as the Arikaras with the new oppressors as Assiniboins and Crees. If the Sioux were the masters lower down the river, Lewis and Clark seemed prepared to brand the Assiniboins as "great rogues" from the north. [11] Just as the captains had misunderstood Arikara- Sioux relations much to the detriment of the expedition's Indian diplomacy, so they failed to appreciate both the ability of the villagers to cope with the northern nomads and the essential equality of the trade arrangement. Because he saw actual trade bargains made between the two parties, La Vérendrye better understood the operation of the system. "The Mandan," he wrote, "are much more crafty than the Assiniboin in their commerce and in everything, and always dupe them." He called the Mandans "sharp traders, [who] clean the Assiniboin out of everything they have in the way of guns, powder, ball, kettles, axes, knives, and awls." [12] If the captains seriously entertained the notion that the villager- Assiniboin link could be broken, they did not account for the trading abilities and needs of either party.