Mandan and Hidatsa Pioneer Northern Plains Agriculture

Agriculture did not evolve on the Northern Plains, it was imported. The nation’s breadbasket was instead a meat market for thousands of years.

More-or-less nomadic bands of early Americans relied primarily on hunting and gathering to sustain themselves. More than ten thousand years, one hundred centuries, before the present, men hunted wooly mammoths and the other great northern elephant, the mastodon, along the edge of a receding glacier in what became North Dakota. Along with turning the Missouri River from its north-flowing course and bending it to flow southeast to meet the Mississippi and discharge into the Gulf of Mexico instead of Hudson Bay, the glacier left behind rich grasslands favored by mega-fauna. The elephants shared the land with giant bison, bisonis antiquas, cameloids and horses. Climate change, over-hunting or a combination of circumstances led to mass extinctions of all those creatures.  

Fortunately for the people who lived by hunting, a smaller bison filled the grassland niche. Tens of millions of bison bisonis roamed the plains and bands of hunter-gatherers followed their movements. So-called Archaic Indians devised successful methods of hunting, including surrounds and buffalo jumps. They gathered fruit and vegetable resources, such as prairie turnips, chokecherries and buffalo berries to supplement diets. 

By 2000 B.P., signs of at least seasonal residential permanence were appearing on the Northern Plains. Along the Missouri River and other watercourses, on the bench lands above the floodplain, large burial mounds were constructed. Woodland era peoples were becoming less nomadic and setting the stage for the Plains Village cultures that would follow. One additional element was needed: agriculture.

Agriculture in the Americas began in the Valley of Mexico 7500 years ago, when small grasses were selectively bred to create corn. The first corn is thought to have been a kind of popcorn that puffed when heated. Generations of farmers shaped the course of the grain’s evolution over centuries, creating many varieties of corn.

Whether through the work of corn “missionaries” or simply trade and commerce, corn spread. By 200 A.D., it was in what has become the United States.

Squash was another early American crop. It has been found in archeological deposits in Kentucky, dated to 3000 B.P. Beans, in multiple varieties, joined the other two crops to make up the traditional American Indians' “Three Sisters.”

The Mandan first moved to the Missouri in what is now eastern South Dakota around A.D. 650, according to prevailing archeological theory.  They migrated from northwestern Iowa or southwestern Minnesota where their characteristic culture had evolved. When they did emigrate to the Missouri valley, they were not in a competition for agricultural land.  They were regional pioneers in making a transition from a woodland era hunting and gathering tradition to one that relied more heavily on cultivated products of the garden.  

Before 1100 A.D., there were groups of Mandan populating the Missouri from central South Dakota to central North Dakota. The Awatixa Hidatsa were slightly north of the Mandan in North Dakota.

A shift in climate at the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Pacific I climate episode, characterized by archeologist Donald Lehmer as an increased flow of dry westerlies into the Northern Plains, seems to have driven most of the Mandan to the somewhat cooler summers of North Dakota.  They established villages in the country above the Grand River and below the Square Buttes, the boundary of Hidatsa territory. Then, around 1450, Pacific I blew itself out.

Around that time, the Mandan established the largest villages in their entire history, like the heavily fortified site of Huff, the Shermer site on the east bank, and Double Ditch, north of Bismarck. Recent archeological research appears to indicate that two new bands of Hidatsa came to the Missouri at that time, settling near the Awatixa by the Knife River. 

By 1600, the Mandan had consolidated into the area between the Heart River and the Square Buttes. That was about the time they shifted from long, rectangular lodges to more lumber-efficient round construction.  The people in the two villages on the east side of the Missouri were of the Nuptadi band.  

Traditional Mandan origin stories have the people coming from under the earth. One group places that entry on the west bank of the mighty Mississippi River near its delta on the Gulf of Mexico.  Others believe that they emerged along the banks of the Missouri, just a little ways south of On-a-Slant.

Those that believed the place of origin was far to the south had an epic migration story to go with the belief.  It was a steady, measured odyssey that brought them to the north. Led by three brothers and their sister the Mandan people left their point of origin and began a long, slow journey to the north.  They were farmers, even then, and they would stop along the journey to plant and harvest corn crops.  They did not live in earthlodges during the migration, but were content to build temporary homes like those used by later generations on eagle-trapping expeditions to the Bad Lands.

When the Mandan reached the place where the Missouri meets the Mississippi, their journey could continue in three directions.  They could head northwest along the Missouri, cross the Missouri, or cross the Mississippi. They chose to cross over to the east bank of the Mississippi. The tribe marched north along the Mississippi, the legend continues, until it was no longer so mighty and the deciduous forests gave way to conifers.  Placing that tree change on a map, the prairie of southern Minnesota gives way to a deciduous forest in a transitional zone closely related to the line of I-94 through the state.  The deciduous forest is a pretty narrow band, yielding to the boreal forest on a line parallel to the prairie-forest transition, say from Itasca State Park in the northwest toward Mille Lacs the St. Croix River.

The northern forests were not good for corn farming, so the Mandan turned south and west, eventually settling for a time by the pipestone quarries. While at Pipestone forty lodges of the Awigaxa band separated from the rest of the nation and drifted north to the region of the Red River and its tributary, the Sheyenne.  They were above the Sheyenne to the north of Devils Lake when a flood encouraged them to move southwest, where they found the Missouri and settled in the Heart River region.

Two great culture heroes, Lone Man and First Creator, convinced most of the people in South Dakota to go north and join their Awigaxa cousins by the Heart.  The bottomlands by the mouth of the Heart were rich and better suited for farming, they said.  Winter buffalo herds sheltered there, too. 

The Nuptadi and Nuitadi began another northern migration, this one in small increments, building villages and planting gardens all along the way.  Eventually they reached the region north of the Cannonball River up to the Heart, where they were reunited with their long-lost relations.  They established some very large villages.  Shermer, on the east bank, was a place where certain remembrances and ceremonies took place even four hundred years or more after its abandonment.¹ Even after the centuries had passed and the walls around the village had fallen, it was still possible to find the central plaza and see the way the streets had been laid out in very straight lines. Shermer was known as the Village Where Turtle Went Back. A sacred turtle who lived in the Missouri near there was the central figure in some of the ceremonies. Across the river from Shermer, the Huff village was another example of the large cities of the 1400s.

The remaining bands of the Awigaxa, tradition said, tried life to the west of the Missouri, settling on small tributary streams running out of the Black Hills.  After a tragic event where many lodges of the Awigaxa disappeared while hunting buffalo for sinew on the south side of the Black Hills, the remainder of the band established fortified villages back on the Missouri south of the Cannonball, near the mouth of the Grand River.  When the Great Flood came, the reunited northern Mandan gathered by the Heart and were protected there by Lone Man and the sacred cedar.  The people at the Grand did not have the sacred cedar.  Some villagers stayed and drowned.  Others, fleeing the flood, escaped to the Rocky Mountains.  The survivors attempted to raise corn in mountain valleys, but seasons there were too short.  When they returned to the Grand, they found the Arikara had claimed the area, so the last element of the Mandan people headed north to the Heart River region, settling between the other Mandan bands and their Hidatsa neighbors to the north.

Once there, however that might have happened, the Mandan of the Heart River Phase were lords of a productive and thriving domain from the southernmost village, On-a-Slant, to the northernmost, Larson.  Two bands of Hidatsa had followed their own migration from eastern North Dakota to the Knife River - Missouri River confluence. A third, the Awatixa, say they have lived nowhere else on earth.

The hunting range of the Mandan-Hidatsa stretched far beyond their towns, reaching out across the buffalo-filled plains to the east of the Missouri and west to the North Dakota Bad Lands.  Along the Missouri riverside, the land was turned over to intensive agriculture.  Family garden plots averaging about two acres in size produced more than sufficient amounts of corn, squash and beans.

The increasing power of the Lakota, and also the Cheyenne, who left their gardens and earthlodges along the James River to take up life in the Black Hills region, was not so great as to bring sieges and destruction of earthlodge villages before 1781.  The villages were still islands of security, where hospitality and trade reigned. The more immediate effects were felt in hunting, where long excursions to the Bad Lands or the prairies became more dangerous.  Trade was also affected.  As John Jackson put it, “The great threat to the river people was a large population of Sioux pressing from the east and Assiniboine warriors attacking the supply route from the west and north.  After horses improved mobility, the danger increased.”

As 1781 dawned, the Mandan lived in seven villages, five on the west side of the Missouri and two on the east. There had been a total of seven villages on the west and three on the east in the Heart River Phase: The temporary village at Eagle Nose Butte, On-a-Slant, Motsiff, Large and Scattered, Boley, Square Buttte Creek and Otter Creek.  It is suspected by Stan Ahler, who dug a site under the city of Mandan in 1999, that Large and Scattered was abandoned early in the eighteenth. On the east side of the river were Yellow Earth, now known as Double Ditch, a state historic site which recent digging indicates dates back to the Huff era of the fifteenth century, and Larson.  The Looking Village in the city of Bismarck was inhabited during the Heart River Phase, but abandoned sometime before 1781. To the north of the Mandan, the Hidatsa held territory running from the Painted Woods area to the north bank of the Knife River, where the only semi-sedentary Hidatsa Proper had established Big Hidatsa village, known to them as Menetarra.  The Awaxawi Hidatsa, often referred to as the Wattasoons or Amahaways, who had come to the Missouri earlier than the Hidatsa Proper and who had been more thoroughly acculturated into a Mandan-type lifestyle, lived in the Painted Woods area.  The Awatixa, neighbors of the Mandan for six hundred years or more, are harder to place.  They likely occupied one or more villages between the Awaxawi and the Hidatsa Proper. The population of the ten or more villages was probably between 20,000 and 25,000 persons.

The Heart River Phase of the Mandan is one of the sub-themes of Interpretation in the Study Area. It is the focus of the On-a-Slant Village interpretation managed by the Fort Abraham Lincoln Foundation.  It was a prosperous time for the earthlodge people. Their gardens were healthy and regularly produced nutritious grains and vegetables, more than could be eaten, and so surpluses protected against famine and fueled trade. Game was plentiful. Refined hunting techniques brought protein, clothing and tools to the earthlodges. Wood was a scarce resource, but that was a fact of life to which the Mandan and Hidatsa had long since adapted.  A balance with nature had been found that allowed their cities to prosper for two hundred years on the same ground.  Their trade networks stretched overland to the north and northeast, and west and southwest.  It brought the traditional luxury items from far away, and a wonderful diverse flow of ever more useful manufactured items of the Canadians.  They had healthy horse herds and were well-armed in relation to their neighbors.

The national and international significance of Mandan and Hidatsa cultures is intrinsic. Their cultures are part of the heritage of America, part of the great tapestry that makes a multi-ethnic nation. But beyond their own value as peoples, the Mandan and Hidatsa were important as pioneers of agriculture in the north. They developed varieties of corn which matured quickly to suit the shorter growing seasons of the Northern Plains. They were successful colonizers of the middle to upper Missouri region. Tens of thousands of them settled in perhaps a dozen permanent villages by the 16^th Century.

In that period, 1500-1781, the Mandan and their Hidatsa allies were undisputed rivers of a rich and productive domain, stretching from On-a-Slant Village south of Mandan, North Dakota, to the mouth of the Knife River, and perhaps beyond.

Within that stretch of river, thousands of acres were intensively gardened, providing consistent food surplus, which fueled both population growth and trade. The cities of the Mandan and Hidatsa grew in size and number.

Something else took place during the Heart River Phase, as well. Whereas villages had formerly lasted half a century or so, Mandan towns of the 16^th, 17^th, and 18^th centuries lasted two hundred years and showed no signs of impending collapse until the devastating smallpox epidemic of 1781.

Not only had the Mandan shown their ability to exploit the resources, they had found a way to live permanently in harmony with a semi-arid region with short growing seasons. Their skills in gardening and crop development, and labor-intensive use of the fertile soil naturally re-fertilized by periodic flooding made them a prominent people. With the allied Hidatsa similarly successful to the north, the Study Area was, in 1781, a rich and productive country.