>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington D.C.
>> Welcome to the National
Book Festival.
My name is Sydney Trent,
and I'm social issues editor
at The Washington Post.
And The Post is a proud sponsor of
this festival, which has been part
of Washington life for
about 15 years now thanks
to its host, the Library
of Congress.
I'm pleased to introduce to
you today Elizabeth Fenn,
author of "Encounters at
the Heart of the World",
which won the Pulitzer
Prize for history in 2015.
As Americans living
in a very modern era
in what is still a young country,
we don't often think about the fact
that we are resting upon centuries
of other human cultures
and civilizations.
In her history of the Mandan people,
Fenn brings to life the culture
and challenges faced
by this Indian nation
that made its home
along the Missouri River
in North Dakota from 1100 to 1845.
The Pulitzer judges called her work
"An engrossing original
narrative showing the Mandans,
a Native American tribe
in the Dakotas,
as a people with a history."
Fenn spent 12 years
working on this book.
Fenn joined the University of
Colorado Boulder faculty in 2012,
and also was a faculty affiliate of
the Department of Ethnic Studies.
She previously taught at
Duke University and at Yale,
and earned her PhD
at Yale University.
Fenn specializes in the
early American West,
focusing on epidemic disease, Native
American, and environmental history.
Her 2001 book "Pox Americana,
The Great Smallpox Epidemic 1775-82"
unearthed the devastating effects
of a smallpox epidemic that coursed
across the North American
continent during the years
of the American Revolution.
She is now at work on an
expansive biography of Sacagawea,
using her life story to
illuminate the wider history
of the Northern Plains and Rockies.
Fenn is also the author with Peter
H. Wood of "Natives and Newcomers,
The Way We Lived in North Carolina
Before 1770", a popular history
of early North Carolina
which appeared in 1983.
And with no further ado, I'd
like to welcome Elizabeth Fenn.
[ Applause ]
>> Well, thank you
all for coming today.
It's a real privilege to share this
most American of stories with you.
Some of you may feel a little
bit disconcerted as you look
at the title of my book
because you're not quite sure
who the Mandan Indians are.
You know, Mandan or Nuweta doesn't
have that familiar ring of Cherokee,
or Narragansett, or
Comanche, or Seminole.
But I want to put you at
ease because, in fact,
you do know about the Mandans.
And the reason you know about
them is that the explorers,
Meriwether Lewis and William Clark,
in their core of discovery
spent the winter of 1804
and 1805 among the Mandans
on the outbound portion
of their famous transcontinental
journey.
So the Mandans were
earth lodge dwellers.
They lived on the Missouri River
in the middle of what we now know
as North Dakota, and they continue
to live there to the present day.
The Mandans and their
ancestors had made their homes
at what they call the Heart of the
World, the confluence of the Heart
and Missouri River since
around the year 1300.
And the Mandans occupied a
distinctive ecological niche.
They grew corn in tremendous
quantities despite living
at the northern limit
of maize cultivation,
and despite living
beyond the 100th meridian,
the widely-accepted Western boundary
of non-irrigated agriculture.
Now the Mandans also harvested
meat, especially bison,
to complement the grain and the
vegetable yield of their gardens.
In the summer-- my slides have
jumped way ahead, haven't they?
In the summer, they hunted
on the plains that extended
in all directions around them.
In the winter, they hunted
for bison in the river bottoms
where the animals took shelter
from the cold and the wind.
And then in the spring, Mandans
harvested delectable float bison.
Float bison were these seasoned,
drowned animals that drifted
by their towns when
the ice broke up.
Now the villagers also acquired
bison products by trading
with itinerant visitors
to their towns.
You might think that the Mandan
reliance on agriculture in a land
of sparse rain, intense
cold, short growing seasons,
you might think this
was a tenuous choice.
But when hardship threatened, the
villagers-- or more precisely,
village women, had a backup plan.
They turned to vast underground
caches of dried corn, beads, squash,
and sunflower seeds that
they kept on hand for trade
and for just such emergencies.
Archeologists have tallied
up almost 70,000 bushels
of underground storage
capacity in the cache pits
of a single Mandan village.
This is the early-Mandan
or pre-Mandan town of Huff.
Now I grew up in New Jersey,
so bushels were like--
were not really on my radar.
I had to go look this up.
As a benchmark, a bushel
is 8 gallons of capacity.
One bushel of dried, shelled
maize weighs 56 pounds.
So think about 70,000 bushels.
The Mandan lifeway
accommodated the unpredictability
of North Dakota's climate in all
but the most dire circumstances.
And 21st century archeology
is beginning
to reveal the extent of
the Mandan's success.
High-tech imaging of sites in
the Heart River area has shown
that several towns were
major population centers.
Double Ditch Village,
just north of Bismarck,
North Dakota may well be the most
spectacular and accessible example.
And the town's name, as you can see,
reflects its most striking
visible feature,
these two clearly-discernible
fortification trenches
that still delineate former
boundaries of this palisaded town.
So when you look at
an image like this,
think of a fortification trench
that's probably originally 6
or 7 feet deep, 15
or 16 feet across.
And on the inner-side of that
trench, think of a palisade
of sharpened stakes
stuck into the earth.
Now it turns out that the name
Double Ditch is misleading.
What appears to be the outermost
trench here does not mark the
outermost boundary of the town.
Scans completed in 2004 revealed two
additional trenches beyond the two
visible ones for a total of four.
What this means is that
in its spatial dimensions,
Double Ditch was once much larger
than scholars had recognized.
Surveys suggest that another
nearby town just a few miles north
of Double Ditch, a
town called Larson,
also had two additional
fortification trenches detectable
primarily through magnetic
radiometry.
So like Double Ditch,
Larson was also much bigger
than scholars had imagined.
Now patterns of expansion
and contraction differ
from village to village.
And I'm sure that future
scholars will add new discoveries.
I'm sure they're going
to surprise us again
as they did at Double Ditch.
For now however, it's clear that
the Mandans in their heyday lived
in as many as 21 different
villages near the Missouri Heart
River confluence.
Some of these villages had
very brief occupations,
but at least six were
so-called traditional villages.
Very large, fortified settlements.
Settlements that lasted
into the 1700s.
So how many people lived here?
Well, it seems likely that the
Heart River towns numbered as many
as 15,000 in population
at their pinnacle.
This would have been
probably around the mid-1500s.
And then in the late
1500s, something happened.
The villagers abandoned those outer
two ditches, and their town shrank
to 15 acres, approximately a
20 percent reduction in size.
So they contracted, in other words,
into the confines of the outermost
of the two ditches that
our eyes can discern today.
Now why did this happen?
What caused Double Ditch to
dwindle in size in the late 1500s?
No Europeans had arrived, at least
in the middle of the continent.
But, sanitation may
have become a problem
as population densities increased.
Or Mandan numbers may have
overwhelmed the carrying capacity
of the land they occupied.
Or perhaps they encountered drought.
Drought was widespread
throughout the 1500s,
and it hit the upper Missouri River
with particular force
between 1574 and 1609.
Now think about the
repercussions of drought.
You know, even if the Mandans
themselves had enough food
to sustain themselves
through these hard years,
drought may have made them the
targets of raids by other peoples.
They had these permanent villages,
they had those food
supplies, those caches.
Because of this, Mandan towns
were always tempting targets.
Now another hazard of
drought is the grasshopper.
Grasshoppers are still the
bane of prairie farmers today.
And grasshoppers proliferate
in dry conditions.
And in fact, agricultural scientists
warn farmers the grasshopper numbers
can double, triple, or quadruple
with each successive
year of drought.
Now it's possible that the cause
of the population collapse
was not pests, but pestilence.
Far to the south, wave after wave of
sickness spread north out of Mexico
in the aftermath of Hernan
Cortez's smallpox-assisted conquest
of the Mexicas, or
the Aztecs, in 1521.
There were at least ten
severe epidemic episodes
between 1531 and 1595.
So these are infections like
smallpox, measles, influenza.
These are viruses from the
otherworld carried by Europeans
and Africans to the Americas.
The question is whether these
contagions reached the Upper
Missouri River during the 1500s.
Now interestingly, the first
European trade items would have been
a sparse handful of glass beads,
maybe a few iron implements.
The first European
trade items appear
in Mandan archeological sites
right around the year 1600,
almost exactly the same time
that the Double Ditch
population collapsed.
Logic suggests that new trade items
and new contagions might have
arrived around the same time.
Now uncertainty dissipates
with the passage of time.
By the early 1700s, plains life was
in upheaval again due to the arrival
of the horse, another new
species to the Americas.
I should say horses really
reintroduced to the Americas.
And plains peoples embraced horses
after New Mexico's Pueblo Revolt
of 1680 made them more
widely accessible,
and horses then spread
northward through the 1700s.
Mandans probably got their first
horse around the year 1740.
Horses, as you can imagine,
meant more frequent interaction
between peoples than ever before.
I mean, imagine the Great
Plains in the absence
of the horse in the Pedestrian Era.
Horses meant more frequent
interaction.
They also hauled or carried much
more than dogs or humans ever could.
They carried trade items,
food, people, teepees.
But they also carried
invisible cargos.
News, information, and sometimes
people infected with microbes.
In the Equestrian Era
of the 1700s and 1800s,
infectious disease became ramped.
Smallpox or some other illness
afflicted Northern Plains peoples
in the 1730s.
And among those who suffered
were the Lakota Sioux, raiding
and trading among the
upper Missouri villagers.
Now Lakota Sioux winter count
marks the winter of 1734, '35,
with a figure bearing an
overlay of dots like those used
to designate a smallpox rash.
And incidentally, that spiral
symbol represents belly ache.
And belly ache was indeed one
of the prodromal symptoms,
one of the early symptoms
of smallpox.
Now we know that Lakota Sioux
traded and raided with the Mandans,
but no accounts of such an
outbreak exists among Mandan people.
So where else can we look?
The telltale evidence
may well lie buried
in ghost towns like Double Ditch.
And remember, by 1600 or so,
the Mandans at Double Ditch
had ensconced themselves behind
that second fortification
ring, the outermost ring
that we can still see today.
Now at some point, the
villagers contracted again,
taking shelter behind the
innermost ditch and palisade.
And the cause may well have been
the smallpox epidemic of 1734, '35.
So Double Ditch in 1500 had
contained 160 homes, 2000 people.
By the mid-1700s there
were just 32 homes,
and no more than 400
people hunkered down inside
that smallest ditch
that you see here.
And then, it happened again.
In 1781, smallpox made its way
to the Upper Missouri River
from Spanish settlements
to the south.
The precise route that
it followed is not clear,
but fleet-footed horses
made its transit easy.
And incidentally, this
epidemic struck the entire North
American continent.
So with their population
depleted and with the threat
of violence apparently
growing by way of attacks
from the Lakota Sioux, the Mandans
now sought safety in numbers.
And they accomplished
this by moving.
They moved 40 or 50 miles north,
and they built new towns beside
a neighboring people known
as the Hidatsas at the confluence
of the Knife River and the Missouri.
And those Heart River villages,
their traditional villages,
once home to thousands
became ghost towns.
Lewis and Clark passed through
23 years after this epidemic,
and they mapped the empty town
sites as they traveled upstream.
So essentially what
happened is that the Mandans
and their northerly neighbors,
the Hidatsas, went from living
in a configuration of towns that
looked like this, to a configuration
of towns that looked like this.
And the Mandans now numbered
approximately 1500 people in all.
That's a 90 percent decline.
Now in the years that followed,
foreign diseases coursed
across the plains.
Whooping cough struck the
villages in the summer of 1806,
possibly again in 1813 and '14,
and then again in 1818 and '19,
filling the air with hacking coughs
and that desperate, you know,
whistle-like wheezing that
gives the infection its name.
The 1818, 1819, whooping cough
epidemic came hand-and-hand
with an outbreak of measles; two
diseases circulating at once.
And as focal points of trade,
as focal points of commerce,
the Knife River villages, the Mandan
villages also became focal points
of contagion.
And reports of infection
are abundant for the peoples
with whom they traded and
raided; the Assiniboines, Lakotas,
and other nearby peoples.
Now thereafter, more
challenges came quickly
as the St. Louis fur trade
extended its reach northward.
Now there is a little
critter called the deer mouse
that had been a perennial
problem in Mandan earth lodges.
Residents of the Mandan town of
Mih-Tutta-Hang-Kusch complained
that deer mice were
very destructive,
and that they gnawed clothing
and other manufactures
to pieces in a lamentable manner.
But, deer mice rarely burrow,
so deer mice left those
underground grain caches alone.
In 1825, a visiting keelboat
brought another new species
to Mih-Tutta-Hang-Kusch.
This was a species that
put the deer mouse,
a native species, into perspective.
The new creature was the Norway
rat, also called the brown rat.
There's your deer mouse.
Here's the lovely rat.
For the Mandans, the site of a new
creature was a momentous occasion,
perhaps even a visitation
of the spirits.
One eyewitness reported
that hundreds came to watch
and look at the strange animal.
"No one," he said,
"dared to kill it."
When the Indians saw a Norway
rat devouring a deer mouse,
they were delighted.
Perhaps if these new
creatures multiplied,
they would rid their earth lodges
of the bothersome deer mice.
Perhaps the spirits
had indeed intervened.
Well, the rats did multiply.
And quickly.
I'm going to spare you the details
of rat reproduction that I learned
in the course of this research.
Suffice it to say that
they're impressive.
[ Laughter ]
There may be children
in the audience.
Sorry.
Reproduction aside though,
Norway rats are diligent,
assiduous burrowers.
They spend much of their life
beneath the surface of the earth.
And this aspect of
rat ecology combined
with their prodigious
reproductive rate
to create dreadful consequences.
The Mandans' underground grain
caches were no match for the rats.
And with a seemingly bottomless
storehouse of maize to consume,
the rats burrowed and multiplied.
Within six years of the rat's
arrival at Mih-Tutta-Hang-Kusch,
eyewitnesses reported that the
animals had infested every wigwam,
and Mandan caches where
they buried their corn
and other provisions
were robbed and sacked.
Earth lodge floors buckled and
collapsed, no longer supported
by stores of grain below.
There was a little fur trading post,
an American fur company
post called Fort Clark
that set beside the village
of Mih-Tutta-Hang-Kusch.
It was actually a little
bit closer than this map
that you see on the
screen indicates.
And Fort Clark was staffed
by a very cranky fur trader,
a gentleman named Francis Chardon.
And you can get a sense of Chardon's
personality by reading his journal.
He detested the Mandans, and
he really detested the rats.
And he started keeping
a record of the numbers
of rats he killed every
month in his journal.
Just excerpts of some of
those records for you here.
You can see that, over the course
of the year from June of 1836 to May
of 1837, he killed a total
of 1600...and it looks
like 86 rats in the
course of a year.
Now that's just in Fort Clark.
Where is all the corn stored?
It's in the Mandan village,
it's in Mih-Tutta-Hang-Kusch.
So you just imagine the rats
in Mih-Tutta-Hang-Kusch.
Now in 1832, as the rats ran amuck,
a steamboat named Yellowstone turned
up the Missouri River, docking
below Mih-Tutta-Hang-Kusch
in order to service Fort Clark.
The Yellowstone was the first
steamer to reach the Mandans.
And like the rats, it
had a voracious appetite.
Not for maize, but for wood.
Now the Mandans consumed
plenty of wood on their own.
Steamboats were in
a different league.
A small steamer like the
Yellowstone needed the equivalent
of 60 ten-inch trees
for each day of travel.
The boats inevitably reloaded
with wood at Mih-Tutta-Hang-Kusch
where wood was in short supply
as early as 1833 and '34.
And the dwindling forests
had far-reaching effects.
In the winter, the
bison herds migrated
to the Missouri River's
forested bottomlands
to escape the full
force of the weather.
For the Mandans, this
made for easy hunting,
this made for abundant meat,
especially in that difficult
season of early spring.
But now with few trees in the
river bottom of the villages,
there was little shelter.
And the winter bison
herds went elsewhere.
"Mandans starving, the
fort full of men, women,
and children a begging meat," wrote
Francis Chardon on December 3, 1836.
Chardon reported plenty of bison
30 miles away on February 4, 1837.
Plenty of bison.
Why didn't the Mandans go hunt them?
They didn't go hunt them because
the Lakota Sioux were nearby,
their enemies were nearby.
So the Mandans thus faced
a three-dimensional problem
in the winter of 1836 and '37.
Their corn was too meager,
the rats were eating it.
The Sioux were too close, and
the bison were too far away.
And in April of 1837, two
additional pressures came to bear.
The first is a mystery.
For some reason, the thawing
Missouri River ice failed
to yield its annual supply
of prized float bison.
Second, the entire Iroquois tribe,
this is a neighboring people
to the south, another tribe
of earth lodge dwellers,
the entire Iroquois
tribe, perhaps as many
as 2000 people sought
shelter with the Mandans
after abandoning their own villages.
The net effect was still more strain
on the Mandan's poultry food stores.
Now the decisive blow
came two months later.
On June 18, 1837 the Fur Company,
steamer St. Peters landed
at Mih-Tutta-Hang-Kusch.
On board were passengers,
supplies, and the smallpox virus.
"A young Mandan died today of the
smallpox," Chardon wrote on July 14.
"Several others have caught it.
Thereafter, the pox ripped
through the Mandan village.
In August 1837, the Mandans
abandoned Mih-Tutta-Hang-Kusch.
The women scoured the town for
orphans belonging to their clans.
And then they fled,
leaving behind the sick
to heal or die on their own.
Their departure was a desperate
act of self-preservation.
Some two or three Mandans survived,
two or three hundred
Mandans survived."
Now think about this.
The year was 1837.
The Mandans had lived through no
more than a century and a half
of contact with European newcomers.
The famous Indian wars of
the West had barely begun.
That phrase, "Manifest
destiny," had yet to be coined.
Railroads and White
homesteaders had yet to arrive.
There had been no violence between
Mandans and European-Americans.
But events had already brought one
of the great nations of the plains
to the brink of destruction,
and they had survived.
And the resilience of the
Mandans who lived on by virtue
of their toughness, their kindness,
their openness, their wisdom,
and their cultural and spiritual
wealth is an inspiration to us all.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
Do we have time for questions?
[ Applause ]
Ten?
So I have time for questions
if anybody has them for me.
Yes, sir.
>> In your talk, and
also in your book,
you talk about the different
levels of disease and whatever.
Can you outline the scientific
data that was left out by writers,
by genetic reviewers too,
so you can point out that,
"On this date, this thing happened.
This date, this thing happened."?
>> It's very hard to pin down exact
dates for the earliest epidemics.
So much of what I do in my research
is sort of triangulate by way
of sources from the
north in Hudson Bay,
from the east and from the south.
So if the Mandans sit in between
these two outbreaks of smallpox
and I know it starts in the
south and it's moving that way,
I can speculate that they're hit in
the summer of 1781 in some cases.
Earlier epidemics are
harder to track.
The later epidemics, 1837, 1838,
it's the easiest epidemic to track
because we have the St. Peters to
watch, God forbid, dropping smallpox
up and down the Missouri River.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah.
>> So did they allow the researchers
in the current time to go
into the grave sites and-- ?
>> No.
>> Not at all?
>> No.
No. And that's-- I mean, these are
protected sites under NAGPRA today
as well, they should be now.
There was a lot of salvage
archeology really up until--
well, because of damming along the
Missouri River, the 1950s, 60s,
and 70s were pretty much devoted
to salvage archeology
along the Missouri River
as archeological sites
were being flooded out,
and there were excavations
done then.
So far, there are a
lot of collections
that still haven't
even been processed
and examined from that period.
>> Thank you.
>> Sure. Thank you.
Yes, ma'am.
>> In your pictures of
the Double Ditch Village,
there was some housing
type of thing.
Is it a privately-owned,
or is it a-- ?
>> No, it's a state site, and
it's recently been reinterpreted.
It's still one of my favorite
historic sites on the planet.
I think it should be a
UNESCO World Heritage site.
And the reason I like it is because
it hasn't been reconstructed.
You know, you just go there and
just fires up your imagination.
So those are-- that's probably a
CCC stone structure that you see
on that site, that little building.
And there's new signage now because
this archeology in the last 10
or 12 years has discovered
these additional ditches,
and the new signage explains it.
It's still-- it's just
a breathtaking site.
If you're ever in North Dakota,
everybody's favorite vacation spot
[laughter], be sure to go there.
It's just north of Bismarck,
and it is well, well worth it.
>> Thank you.
>> Yes.
>> Hi.
So after the Mandan moved north
to where the Hidatsa were,
how did they interact?
Did their proximity
cause any conflict?
>> Great question.
Yes, Mandans and Hidatsas
were allies,
but they didn't always get along.
And we can think of comparable
cases for the United States today.
So whenever Lakota threatened,
you could count on Mandans
and Hidatsas collaborating
to fend them off.
But, why did the Mandans stop
where they did migrating northward?
Hidatsas wouldn't let
them go any further.
And there were some conflicts
between Mandans and Hidatsas,
so that's an excellent,
excellent question.
Hidatsas protected especially
their bison-hunting territories
and would not let the Mandans
expand further northward.
>> Thank you.
>> You're welcome.
>> Thank you for a very good talk.
Could you add just a couple
of additional comments
about the Mandan relationships
with other tribes
through their stay in
that part of America?
>> Absolutely.
The Mandan villages, as I mentioned,
were the hub of commerce
on the plains.
I sometimes describe them to
people as Walmart but not tacky.
[ Laughter ]
With this like vibrant
cultural and social life.
So if you can imagine Kiowas,
Arapahoes, Cheyennes, Assiniboines,
Crees, even Ojibwas or
Anishinaabes, you know,
the plains just teaming with people.
This was the destination.
And when you arrived at a Mandan
village, even if you were an enemy,
once you were within
the village walls,
you were on safe terrain,
you would not be harmed.
So Mandan peoples could
often war with people,
especially Lakota Sioux,
one day, have a battle,
and the next day be
trading with them.
Other-- you know, and
Lakotas were sort
of the constant perennial enemies.
The other peoples, you know, were
constant friends or, you know,
relations like with
the Assiniboines.
It blew hot and cold over
say 15 year cycles or so.
Yes, sir.
>> Thank you very much
for this presentation.
I have question that emerges from
this picture that you painted
of the Central Plains as being
a place of mobility and a place
of movement with the Equestrian
Revolution, and the coming
of the steamboat, and these new
trade networks that are emerging.
So there's this notion that the
Mandan people could have left,
and they could have gone elsewhere
and perhaps recreated new
communities in the phase
of this epidemic disease that
was devastating their societies.
Is there any suggestion or evidence
that people migrated
elsewhere as a result of this?
>> Oh, that's a great question.
During any of these
big epidemic outbreaks,
the question would have been
where to go because the spread
of pestilence was so
ubiquitous, it was so widespread,
there was not really any safe place.
But the point you made is really
significant because think about--
I mean, it's important to us today.
If there's a smallpox
outbreak, would you rather be
in Washington D.C.
or in North Dakota?
Right? In Washington D.C.,
you're a sitting duck
because the population density.
The transmission is
just so much easier.
And the Mandan villages are the
analogy to Washington D.C. Right?
Because their population is so
compressed inside their villages.
So when infection struck,
everybody would get sick.
So after the 1837, '38, epidemic,
Mandans actually tested a
nomadic lifestyle for a while.
And they spent several years--
these are called the lost
years of the Mandans.
They spent several years in
different bands on the move,
just these small handfuls of people.
And then eventually, they
returned to the Missouri River
and they formed a village called
Like-a-Fishhook, a combined village
of Mandans, Hidatsas, and Iroquois.
It was formed in 1845.
The Iroquois joined
them a little bit later.
But they did experiment
with a different lifeway.
And nomadic peoples we know when
these epidemics struck were not
so severely affected
as the Mandans were.
It's one of the reasons that
the Lakota people were able
to overrun them as they migrated
westward across the plains.
Yes, ma'am.
>> Did the Mandans have
their own language?
And do we know their story
from their own either written
or verbal stories or from other, you
know, others telling their story?
>> They do have their own language.
And there's a gentleman
named Edwin Benson who's--
gosh, he must be about
90 years old today.
He's the last really
fluent Mandan speaker.
He has been working
with some younger folks
through the tribal college
in Newtown North Dakota
to make tape recordings and to
teach younger people the language.
The Mandan language
is a Siouan language,
so it's a big language group kind
of related to the Sioux language.
And we do have good ethnographies
from the early 20th century
in which anthropologists have
recorded Mandan creation stories,
the stories of their landscape.
I like to think-- you know,
I showed you those images
of Lakota winter counts.
A winter count was the way that
many plains peoples kept track
of their own history
through the passage--
through the recording of a single
memorable event for each winter.
And I like to think of the North
Dakota landscape as a winter count
in its own right because
all these features
on the landscape embody Mandan
creation stories; the tales,
the history that makes
them a people,
and their foundational
ceremony, the Okipa ceremony,
which was incidentally the
origins of the Plain Sundance.
The Okipa ceremony
happened every year.
And what was it?
It was essentially a
reenactment of their history.
Yes, sir.
>> I was wondering about the
picture in front of us now here.
Could you say anything
about the archeologist?
What we see there, I
don't know what we see.
>> Yeah. Okay, what you see there--
see the scooped-out
place in the soil there?
Those scooped-out places were
once the sites of earth lodges.
And so, the Mandan village,
you could see it better
from the aerial views
of Double Ditch.
Each one of these big, dish-like,
scooped-out areas was the
site of an earth lodge.
Now you will see smaller,
circular marks in the soil too,
and those are usually the
locations of grain caches.
So this is Mih-Tutta-Hang-Kusch,
the last Mandan village.
It's the village that was wiped
out by the smallpox
epidemic of 1837, '38.
Incidentally when the Mandans
left it, the Iroquois took over.
And then a couple years
after the Iroquois took over,
it was burned to the
ground by the Sioux.
And the Iroquois then
rebuilt it from scratch.
Other questions?
Oh, sure. Come on up.
>> You mentioned earlier
that the known history
of what we've already
detected goes back to 1100.
I presume that's the period
when maize has been bred
to survive this far north.
And I'm also wondering what
particular agricultural techniques
they developed that enabled them
to have a thriving
agricultural society.
>> Yeah. Mandans have a story
of a founding figure
named Good Furred Robe
who taught them how to grow maize.
And just briefly, gosh, if I
could get into Mandan agriculture,
Mandan women were phenomenal
farmers.
I mean, we owe such a debt
to indigenous food ways.
Mandan women grew probably
13 or so varieties of corn,
each variety for a
different purpose.
They knew how to plant in
different areas on a plot
because of prevailing winds
would cause a certain pattern
of cross pollination
to develop, you know,
the particular crosses
that they wanted.
Some corn they popped, some
corn they ground into flour.
They were absolutely-- some they
treated with alkaline salts,
making grits, you know, and
making the niacin available
to avoid pellagra in
a maize-based culture.
Mandan women were just
phenomenal agriculturalists.
Am I out of time?
Two more minutes.
Okay.
Yes, sir. Or ma'am.
>> What was the nugget you learned
about the Mandan that prompted you
to write a book about them?
>> So I was-- I'm an
early American historian.
Right?
And, you know, the early American
history that I grew up with--
gosh, we didn't even talk
about the Spanish colony.
We talked about the Mayflower.
Right?
And 13 colonies, and the
march of progress westward.
So during my smallpox book, I come
across this huge population hub
out in the middle of North Dakota.
Right at the time of
the American Revolution,
there's a population hub bigger
than Charleston, South Carolina,
the fourth biggest city
on the Atlantic Seaboard.
And I just said, "Holy cow!
What if we told the
story of early America
from the center of the continent?
What if we counted all
the people as Americans?"
Right?
[ Applause ]
I mean, this is American history.
This is the quintessential
American story.
So, thank you.
I will stop there.
[ Applause ]
>> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.