Ahistory ofN.D.’s Mandan tribe
In long-ago times, the Mandan Indians had an oracle stone, a rock outcropping about 20 feet across, that was covered with lichen. Each spring, they spent days washing the stone, smoking, singing and fasting, as they waited for designs to appear in the lichen that would predict the future.
If the designs spoke true, the Mandans must have been horrified at what they saw, because their future was the worst of any tribe along the Missouri River.
They were attacked by warrior tribes and beset by Norway rats transported to America on European ships, which decimated their grain stores.
Worst of all, they fell victim to the whiteman’s diseases. Some 90 percent of the Mandans were wiped out bymeasles, whooping cough and smallpox in the 1830s. The Mandans still exist but only as one of three tribes thatmake up the Fort Berthold reservation in North Dakota.
Most of us knowthe Mandans through the sketches and paintings of 19th-century artist George Catlin thatwere made just before the smallpox epidemic hit. Especially strikingwere Catlin’s paintings of a Sun Dance-like ritual called Opika, complete with self-torture and sexual exploits. Other than that ceremony, not much is known about the tribe, especially in its earlier days.
That’s why “Encounters in the Heart of theWorld” (the Mandans referred to the land as the heart of the world) is such a welcome book. Elizabeth A. Fenn, an associate professor at the University of ColoradoBoulder, combed early narratives, one going back to 1689, written by explorers
HISTORY: AMERICAN INDIANS his exploration party. The women’s sexual license, he wrote, “was almost [the men’s] sole motive for their journey hereto.”
The Indian men hunted, fought enemies and carried on traditions.
As a relatively peaceful group that lived close together in their villages, the Mandans were susceptible to contagious diseases. The first smallpox epidemic hit Missouri tribes in 1781, spread in part by warriors who took the scalps of infected enemies. The plague wiped out entire clans, although it left a few of the people immunized. They survived the later smallpox outbreak that killed so many of their tribe.
By the 1830s, the Mandan faced problems of survival.
“Their cornwas too meager, the Siouxwere too close, and the bisonwere too far away,” writes Fenn. Then came the 1838 smallpox outbreak, which turned the upper Missouri “into one great graveyard,” according to an Indian agent.
“Great Father, look over the prairie, when it is covered with grass and dotted with beautiful flowers of all colors, pleasant to the sight and the smell,” a Mandan chief said to Abraham Lincoln in 1864. “Throw a burning torch into this vast prairie, and then look at it, and remember the life and happiness that reigned there before the fire. Then you will have an image ofmy nation.”
TheMandans never recovered.