Keith - Winter with the Mandan Indians

The winter of 1804-1805 was the coldest winter and time on the trip and it is a good thing the Corps of Discovery found the Mandan Village.  The Corps of Discovery started in 1804.  As they went along their journey to find a water route that would go from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean it started to get colder for the winter when they were around the area that is now modern day North Dakota.

The Corps had nowhere to go for the winter so one day they found one of the Mandan Indian tribe.  They were very lucky they found this because they had no clue what was coming up.  In front of them in the future of the winter, were temperatures forty degrees below zero.  Clark had one day recorded in his journal “Capt. Lewis took off the Toes of one foot of the boy who got frost bit Some time ago.”     

This is part of the one of the Mandan villages. The the right is a picture of the Indians walking into their tribe.

      In the 16^th century the Mandan villages were ravaged by deadly smallpox and that had been     repeated for decades.  From 1837 and 1838 they were hit again.  An American steamboat infected it with passengers that infected them.  This disease infected the Mandan settlements.  Even the chief of the villages died from this.  The Mandan was made up of 5 different villages around the mouth of the Knife River.  The population was estimated at about 4,000 Indians. This was also the largest concentration of Indians by the Missouri River.  The Mandan and Hidatsa were both separate tribes but they worked together to defend against the Sioux.  The Mandan people were very friendly to the Corps and treated them nicely, but the Hidatsa’s did not.

In the Mandan Village the Corps had much to do, they were kept busy by repairing equipment, trading with the Indians, they even grew crops, most importantly they hunted for buffalo and defended from their enemies, the Sioux.  Another thing that the Indians did there were they grew crops.  Some of the crops that they grew were plants like corn, beans, and squash. These were also one of the many foods they ate.  One way the Mandan hunted for buffalo was a special dance.  The dance was just a normal dance where the danced in circles to the banging of drums and sang and it slowly got louder. During all this a “youngster” would go up to an old man and beg him to take his wife.  Clark says “All this is to cause the buffalow to Come near So that They may kill them.”

            Buffalo hunting was one of the things that they did most.  One time when the Corps went hunting they bumped in to their enemies the Sioux.  They Sioux attacked but the Corps got away.  The time that they spent at Mandan the Corps had to watch out for the Sioux.  The Sioux were another Indian tribe who were enemies of the Mandan Indian tribes.  The Sioux were big threats to    the Mandan tribes and the Corps.  The Corps was lucky that the Sioux did not kill them when they were at the Mandan.         

This is a picture of the corn that they probably ate with the Indians. To the right is a drawing of the buffalo hunting that happened.

          The Mandan tribe was one of a couple Indian tribes in the general area.  But the main two tribes were the Mandan and the Hidatsa tribes.  In the actual tribe there would be one big post in the middle of the tribe with forty to fifty different dome shaped tents that were called “lodges”.  

Each lodged fit about 5 - 16 people comfortably.  Those 5 – 16 people that lives in a lodge would live in it for about 10 years.  The lodges were basically their homes. That was where they slept during the night.  The population of the village was estimated at about 4,000 Indians.  Also the entire village would be surrounded with a fence of logs with a 15-foot deep ditch around it.  This protected them from their enemies including the Sioux.  Also this was the birthplace of Sacagawea’s baby that she carried until the journey was over.

    Before Lewis and Clark came to the Mandan Village, white traders had been visiting to trade with the Indians.  Back then the Mandan and Hidatsa tribes were the center of trade by modern day North Dakota, or the Northern Plains.  During the trading season the Mandan is filled with a big variety of goods and a really good variety of people.  Some of the goods that they had include, Spanish horses and mules, fancy Cheyenne leather clothing, meat products, English guns, baskets of corn, beans, squash, and tobacco.  All of these goods and more were sold all through out trading seasons.

Above is a picture of the buffalo dance and the what the actual tribes looked like. Below is a picture of the frozen rivers that they had to deal with. To the right is a map of where the Fort Mandan actually was.

The ice started to form on the rivers by November.  They got so frozen that Lewis’s keelboat got stuck in the river when he went out to go repair it. Lewis tried everything that he could to get the boat free but the river was just so frozen.  He tried to go up to the ice under the boat and pore boiling hot water on it but even that didn’t work.  He also tried to manually chip the ice off with an axe.  After weeks of trying different things he finally got it free.  Because of this the Indians and Corps both knew that they were in for a long winter ahead of them at the Mandan Indian tribe.  In November itself the snow was already knee deep.  Hunting parties for buffalo would come back frostbitten from being in that knee-deep snow. They would also get cuts and bruises from hunting.  But thankfully for this they had a medicine to cure for that.

           During the Corps of Discovery’s journey they stayed at multiple different Indian Tribes and Villages, but the tribe that stands out the most is the Mandan Village. The Mandan Village was the coldest time of the entire journey and was probably the most memorable for Lewis and Clark. It was freezing out, they hunted, made good relations with the Indians, and experienced frostbite and many injuries. They were probably happy once that winter was over, but they had to leave their new friends, the Mandan Indians.

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