Transcripts For CSPAN3 Elizabeth Fenn On Encounters At The H

Transcripts For CSPAN3 Elizabeth Fenn On Encounters At The Heart Of The World 20170716

Thank you all for coming. It is a privilege to share this most american of stories with you. Some of you may feel disconcerted as you look at the title of my book. Because you are not quite sure who the mandan indians are. Familiarot have that , or comanche or seminole. But i want to put you at ease because in fact you do know about the mandan. And the reason you know about them is because, the explorers lewis and clark in their era of discovery, spent the winter of 1804 and 1805 among the mandan on the outbound portion of their famous transcontinental journey. Were earth dwellers and 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 mandan and their ancestors had made their homes at what they called the heart of the world, the confluence of the heart and Missouri Rivers since around the year 1300. The mandan occupied a distinctive ecological niche. They grew corn in tremendous quantities despite living at the northern limits of maize cultivation. And despite living beyond the widely accepted western boundary of non arrogated 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. Oh. 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. Then in the spring, mandans harvested delectable float bison. They were these seasoned, drowned animals that drifted by their towns when the ice broke up. The villagers also acquired bison products by trading with visitors to their town. You might think that the mandan reliance on agriculture in a land of sparse rain, intense cold, short growing seasons, you might think this is a tenuous choice. But, when hardships threatened the villagers, or more precisely village women, they had a backup plan. They turned to vast underground caches of dried corn, beach, squash, Sunflower Seeds that they kept on hand for trade and such emergencies. Archaeologists have tallied up almost 70,000 bushels of underground Storage Capacity in the pits of a single mandan village. This is the early mandan or premandan town of hough. I grew up in new jersey, so bushels were like not really my radar. I had to look this up. As a benchmark, a bushel is eight gallons of capacity. 1 bushel of dried shelved maize weighs 56 pounds. So think about 70,000 bushels. The mandan life accommodated the unpredictability of north dakotas climate in all but the most dire circumstances. 21st century archaeology is beginning to reveal the extent of the mandan success. Hightech imaging of sites in the heart river area have 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 name of the town reflects its most striking visible features, the discernible trenches that still form the boundaries of this town. So when you look at an image like this, thank of a trench that was probably originally six or 7 feet deep, 5060 feet across and on the inner side of that trench think of a palisade , of it sharpened stakes stuck in the earth. It turns out that the name double ditch is misleading. What appears the outermost trench here does not mark the outermost boundary of the town. Scans completed in 2004, reveal two additional trenches beyond the two visible ones for a total of four trenches. What this means is that in its spatial dimensions, double ditch was much larger than scholars had recognized. Surveys suggest another nearby north, at a few miles town called larson also had two additional fortification trenches, detected through radiology technology. So like double ditch, it was much bigger than scholars had imagined. Patterns of expansion and contraction differ from village to village. And im sure that future scholars will add new discoveries. I am sure they will surprise us again as they did at double ditch. For now, however, its clear that the mandan in their heyday lived in as many as 21 different villages near the Missouri River and heart river confluence. Some of these villages had very brief occupations, but at least six were socalled traditional villages. Very large, fortified settlements, settlements that lasted into the 1700s. So, how many people live here . The, it seems likely that heart river towns numbered as many as 15,000 in population at their pinnacle. This would have probably been around the mid1500s. And then in the late 1500s, something happened. The villagers abandoned those outer two ditches. And the town shrank to 15 acres. Approximately a 20 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 droughts. Drought was widespread throughout the 1500s and hit the upper Missouri River with particular force between 1574 and 1609. Now, think about direct repercussions of droughts. Even if they had enough food to sustain themselves through these hard years, droughts may have made them the target of raids by other people. They had these permanent villages. They had food supplies, those caches. Because of this, mandans were always tempting targets. Another hazard of drought is the grasshopper. Grasshoppers still the bane of prairie farmers today and grasshoppers proliferate in dry conditions. In fact, agricultural scientists warn farmers that grasshopper numbers can double, triple or quadruple with each successive year of drought. Now, its 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 smallpox assisted conquest of the aztecs in 1521. There were at least 10 severe epidemics between 1531 and 1595, so these are infections like smallpox, measles, influenza. These are viruses from the other world carried by europeans and africans to the americas. The question is whether these contagions reached the upper Missouri River during the 1500s. 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 archaeological sites right around the year 1600. Almost exactly the same time that the double ditch population collapsed. Logic suggests that the trade items and contagions might have arrived around the same time. Now, uncertainty dissipates with the passage of time by the early 1700s. Now life was in upheaval again because of the arrival of the horse. Another new species to the americas. The horse was really reintroduced to the americas and plains people embraced the horses after new mexicos revolt made them more widely accessible. And horses then spread northward through the 1700s. Mandans probably got there first their first horse around the year 1740. Horses, as you can imagine, meant more frequent interaction between people than ever before. Horses meant more interactions than ever before. Horses meant to more frequent interaction and also hauled or than dogs ormore humans ever could. Food,arried trade items, people tepees. Carried invisible cargoes news, information and sometimes people infected with microbes. In that equestrian era of the 1700s and 1800s, Infectious Disease became rampant. Smallpox or some other illness afflicted the Northern Plains people in the 1730s, and among those who suffered were the lakota sioux, rating and trading raiding and trading among the upper missouri villagers. The lakota sioux mark to the winter of 1735 with a figure bearing an overlay of dots like used to designate a smallpox rash. Incidentally, thats bilateral symbol represents an bellyache. Earlyas one of the symptoms of smallpox. Traded the lakota sioux mandans. But no accounts of an outbreak exists among the mandan people. So, where else can we look . The evidence may well lie buried in ghost towns like double ditch. Remember by 1600 or so, the mandan of double ditch at ensconced themselves behind that second fortification, the outermost ring we can still see today. Now at some point, the villagers contracted again. Taking shelter behind the innermost ditch and palisade. The cause may well have been the smallpox epidemic of 17341735. Double ditch in 1500 had contained 160 homes, 2000 people. By the mid1700s, they were only and there were only 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 into the upper Missouri River from spanish settlements to the south. The precise route it followed was not clear. But, fleet footed horses made it its transit easy. And the epidemic struck entire north american continent. So, with their population depleted and with the threat of violence apparently growing by way of attacks from the sioux s the lakota sioux, the mandan sought safety in numbers and they accommodated this by moving. They moved 40 or 50 miles north and they built new towns by a neighboring people. At the confluence of the ninth e river and the missouri. And those heart river villages, traditional villages, once home to thousands, became ghost towns. Lewis and clark passed through 23 years after this epidemic and they mapped the empty townsite as they traveled upstream. Essentially what happened is that the mandans and their northerly neighbors went from living in a configuration of towns that looked like this, to a configuration of towns that look like this. And the mandans now numbered approximately 1500 people. That is a 90 decline. In the years that followed, foreign diseases coursed across the plains. Whooping cough struck the villages in the summer of 1806 and possibly again in 1813 and 1814. And then again in 1818 and 1819, filling the air with hacking coughs and that desperate whistle like wheezing that gives the infection its name. The 18181819 whooping cough epidemic came handinhand with an outbreak of measles. Two diseases circulating at once and as focal points of trade and commerce, the river villages, the mandan villages also became focal points of contagion and reports of infection are abundant for the people with whom they traded and raided. Thereafter, more challenges came quickly as the st. Louis fur trade extended its reach northward. There is a Little Critter called the deer mouse that had been a perennial problem in mandan earth lodges. Residents of a mandan town complained that deer mice were very destructive and that they gnawed clothing and other manufacturers to pieces. But, deer mice rarely burrow, so deer mice left those underground rain caches alone. In 1825, a visiting boat brought another new species. 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. Theres your deer mouse and here is a lovely rat. For the mandan, the sight 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, and perhaps the spirits had indeed intervened. Well, the rats did multiply and quickly. I will spare you the details of rat reproduction that i learned in the course of this research. Suffice it to say, they were impressive. There may be children in the audience. Reproduction aside, the norway rats are assiduous burrowers and they spend much of their life beneath the surface of the earth. And this aspect of rat ecology combined with their prodigious reproductive rates, came together to create a dreadful consequence. The mandans underground rain 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 rats arrival, eyewitnesses reported that the animals had infested every wigwam. And the mandan caches where they buried their corn and other provisions were robbed and sacked. Earth logic floors buckled and collapsed, no longer supported by stores of grain below. There was a little fur trading post called fort clark that sat beside the village and this is actually a little bit closer than the map that you see on the screen indicates. And fort clark was staffed by a very cranky fur trader, a gentleman named francis. You can get a sense of his personality by reading his journal. He detested the mandan and he really detested the rats and he started keeping a record of the number of rats he killed every month in his journal. Just some of the excerpts here. You can see over the course of a year from june 1836 to may of 1837 he killed a total of 1686 rats. Now, thats just in a fort clark. Wheres all the corn stored . Its in the mandan village. Just imagine the rats at the village. Now, in 1832, as the rats ran amok a steamboat named yellowstone came up the Missouri River docking outside the , village in order to service fort clark. The yellowstone was the first steamer to reach the mandan. Like the rats, it had a voracious appetite. Not for maize, but that wood. Mandan consumed plenty of wood on their own. Steamboats were in a different league. A small steamer like the yellowstone needed the equivalent of 60 10 inch trees for each day of travel. The boats inevitably reloaded with wood where it was in short supply as early as 1833 and 1834. And in dwindling forests, this has farreaching effects. In the winter, the bison herds migrated to the Missouri Rivers forested bottomlands to escape the full force of the weather. For the mandan, this made for easy hunting. It made for abundant meat, especially in that difficult season of early spring. But, now with few trees in the river bottom near the villages, there was little shelter and the winter bison herds went elsewhere. Mandans starving, the fort full of men, women and children. Wrote francis, 1836. He reported, plenty of bison 30 miles away. On february 4, now 1837, plenty of bison. Why didnt the mandan go hunt them . They didnt go hunt them because lakota sioux where nearby were nearby. Their enemies were nearby. So the mandan faced a three dimensional problem in the winter of 1836 and 1837. Their corn was too meager. The rats were eating it. And the bison were too far away. 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 tribe, this is a neighboring people to the south, another tribe of earth is a neighboring people to the lodge dwellers, the entire 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 food source. Now, the decisive blow came two months later. On june 18, 1837, the company steamer st. Peters landed. Onboard were passengers, supplies and the smallpox virus. A young mandan died today of the smallpox he wrote on july 14. Several others have caught it. Thereafter, the pox ripped through the mandan village. In august, 1837, the mandan abandoned the village. 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 selfpreservation. Some two or three mandans survived, 200 or 300 mandans survived. 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 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. They had survived. The resilience of the mandan 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] elizabeth i have times i have time for questions if anybody has any for me. In your talk and in your book you talk about the Different Levels of disease. The Scientific Data that was left out by writers by genetic reviewers, see can point out that on this date this thing happened . Elizabeth it is very hard to pin down exact dates for the earliest epidemics. Much of what i do in my research is triangulate by way of sources from the north and hudson bay. From the east and from the south. At the mandan city between these two outbreaks of smallpox, i can speculate they were hit in the summer of 1781. Earlier epidemics are harder to track. 1838 is the easiest attract because we have st. Ers to watch, god for bid, god forbid, dropping smallpox up and down the Missouri River. Do they allow researchers to go into the gravesites . Elizabeth no. These are protected sites, as well they should be. There was a lot of the salvage archaeology. Dammingof dammn along the Missouri River archaeological sites were being , flooded out. There were excavations on this. There are a lot of collections that have not been processed and examined from that period. Elizabeth yes, maam. In your pictures of the double ditch village, there was housing. Was it privately owned . Elizabeth no, it is a state site. It has recently been reinterpreted. It is one of my favorite Historic Sites on the planet. I think it should be a unesco World Heritage site. It has not been reconstructed. You go there and it fires up your imagination. A stoneprobably structure, that building. There is new signage because archaeology in the last 10 or 12 years has discovered these additional ditches and the new signage explains it. It is a breathtaking site. If you are ever in north dakota, everybodys favorite vacation spot, be sure to go there. It is just north of bismarck, and it is well worth it. After the mandan moved north, were, howhe hidatsa do they interact . Were they in conflict .

© 2025 Vimarsana