The quantity of the crops grown was so large as to allow the Mandan to live by trading crops for everything else they might need, including garments, metal goods, and weapons. This allowed the Mandans, and to a certain extent their neighboring Hidetsa, to eschew the nomadic and hunter-gathering of the other plains peoples.
The degree of agricultural practice was so successful and unusual that the occasional European visitors suspected the Mandan were European settlers. One diarist, who was fluent in English, German, and Polish, failed to understand their language and speculated that the Mandan were Welsh !
The origin of the adoption of agriculture by the Mandan is not known; the date is estimated by studies of remains. The Mandan foundational myth is that the Great Spirit brought corn up the Mississippi River to the Missouri and settled the people along the river with the corn. This suggests to me that somewhere along the way, someone or group had the insight that growing corn was feasible, and the methods improved and crops grew more diverse over time. North Dakota is by no means a leading area of corn cultivation; some of the most fertile land in the world is to the nearby south, in Iowa and Illinois. But the Mandan and Hidetsa adopted farming, and nobody else at the time did.
Because the Mandan were farmers who did not travel much, the broader public were not aware of them until the publication of the Meriwether Lewis and William Clark Expedition, who wintered with the Mandan in 1805 and 1807. The interpreter for Lewis and Clark was the legendary Sakajawea (Sakakawea in Mandan), a young mother who had been taken from her native Shoshone as a child in a Mandan raid. Sakakawea’s very talkative French-Canadian husband, Toussaint Charbonneau, convinced Lewis and Clark that he knew Shoshone and all of the other native languages to the Pacific coast, and to take the family with them. It turned out that he didn’t know any of the languages, but Sakakawea did (I can picture this.)
As we might expect, the Mandan suffered terribly with the influx of the White Man, but the reasons are not what we might think. The smallpox epidemic of 1778-81 took a toll all over America, but especially for the Mandan, as they lived much more densely in their villages than did the nomadic tribes. The arrival of steamboat traffic on the Missouri River around 1816 brought deforestation by the demand for wood for fuel, which made it difficult for the Mandan to find wood for their homes and their needs. The steamboats also brought Norwegian rats, which devoured the corn in the Mandan storage bunkers. The supply of guns to the competing tribes in trade with the Americans made it more difficult for the Mandan to defend themselves. The confluence of these problems was too much to overcome. By 1848, the small number of survivors were absorbed into other tribes, and the Mandan story comes to an end.
The author, Elizabeth Fenn, has both an unusual background and writing style. She obtained a Ph.D. in History, with her well-regarded dissertation on the smallpox epidemic in the late 1700s. She then lacked motivation to continue in the field, and worked for eight years as an automobile mechanic. Somehow rejuvenated, she re-entered the field and is a Professor of History at the University of Colorado, Boulder. I have not found any mention of her ancestry as Native American, but the photograph of her hints of Native American features. She is clearly sympathetic to the Native American experience, but the book is not political in tone nor advocating of any specific actions.
Professor Fenn has not written the account in chronological order. Rather, within a given subject area, she moves between historic events and her present-day visits to villages or archeological sites. It is as if she is writing in the order in which she learned the information. I am not normally a fan of deviating much from the chronological timeline. For example, I thought Edmund Morris ruined his biography of Thomas Edison by going backwards in time. However, I think Professor Fenn pulled this off beautifully, and it added to my enjoyment of the book.
This book is important for providing the narrative of a unique people of the Americas. It also shows that the image of the Native peoples as monolithic, Stone-age savages should be retired, if it hasn’t been already. The book also reinforces the extreme difficulty of integrating the existing Native American society with enormous numbers of European settlers, prosperously and peacefully. The consequences of failing this possibly insurmountable challenge are with us today.
