In 1804-05, Lewis and Clark spent the winter with the Mandan people on the banks of the Missouri River in what is now central North Dakota. They described a generous and prosperous people who made the explorers comfortable as honored guests in their roomy earthen lodges. A few years later, artists Karl Bodmer and George Catlin immortalized the Mandans by illustrating their people and their villages. Only a few years later the Mandans were all but gone.
The Mandan story begins about A.D. 1000 on the Missouri River in what is now southeastern South Dakota. Archaeologists have traced their slow migration upstream before finally settling in central North Dakota. By 1500, there were about 12,000 Mandans in several villages along the river. They were primarily sedentary agriculturalists, unlike the better known Plains tribes like the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Crow, who followed the buffalo herds across the region. Thanks to the foresight of North Dakotans in the 1930s, many of these village ruins are permanently preserved near Bismarck.
In this engaging study, University of Colorado historian Elizabeth Fenn rebuilds the 1,000-year history using archaeology, ethnology, anthropology, epidemiology, and other disciplines. These farmers and traders built a vast network of exchange, first with their native neighbors, and then with French, English, and Spanish traders. Fenn shows how the Mandans grew and prospered, but the European invasion proved to be too much for them. First came the havoc brought by the arrival of horses that empowered competing tribes. In the 1800s, smallpox and other European diseases decimated the Mandans, leading to a general collapse, and their villages were abandoned. Fenn’s discussion of these traumatic events is a major contribution to the history to the people of the Great Plains.
Using all of the tools of modern scholarship, Fenn has produced an absorbing and definitive history of one of America’s great Native people. It recently won a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize for history. – Mark Michel
