The Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara: Lords of the Missouri

Long before this bend in the Missouri River carried steamboats or railroad bridges, it was the center of the most powerful trading civilization on the Northern Plains. The Mandan people had lived in permanent earth-lodge villages near the Heart River confluence for centuries, building dome-shaped homes up to sixty feet across from cottonwood logs, willow branches, and a thick layer of earth. One lodgehome could shelter a dozen people along with horses and stored grain. Women built, owned, and maintained them.

The Mandan were not nomadic hunters. They were farmers and merchants. They cultivated corn, beans, squash, sunflowers, and tobacco in fields tended with deer-antler rakes and bison-shoulder hoes. Their villages, like the one at Double Ditch seven miles north of present-day Bismarck, were occupied for nearly three hundred years, centers of commerce where nomadic nations came from hundreds of miles away to exchange buffalo robes and dried meat for corn and pottery.

To the north, the Hidatsa occupied villages along the Knife River. The Arikara, related in language to the Pawnee, pressed up from the south. Together these three peoples controlled the middle Missouri trade network, and any traveler moving across the continent passed through their world.

Then came smallpox. The epidemic of seventeen eighty-one to seventeen eighty-two swept through the villages with catastrophic speed. At Double Ditch, a population that may have numbered over a thousand vanished almost overnight. Along the Heart River, Mandan populations of perhaps ten thousand collapsed to fewer than twelve hundred survivors by eighteen hundred. The survivors abandoned the Heart River villages and moved north to join the Hidatsa along the Knife River. The empty lodges Lewis and Clark observed in eighteen oh four had been vacant for two decades.

The Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara peoples endured. Their descendants, the Three Affiliated Tribes, remain in North Dakota today. But the Missouri River communities that greeted the first European explorers had already been transformed by a disease that moved faster than any horse.