Mandan people she 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, quote, an engrossing original narrative showing the mandan, a native american type in the dakotas as a people with a history. She spent 12 years working on this book. Elizabeth fenn joined the university of colorado, boulder faculty in 2012 and also the faculty affiliate of the department of ethnic studies. She previously taught at Duke University and at yale and earned her phd at yale university. She specializes in the early American West focusing on epidemic disease, native american and environment all al history. Her 2001 book, pox americana, the great smallpox academic epidemic of 177582 unearthed a devastating effect of a smallpox epidemic that went through the north American Continent during the years of the american revolution. She is now at work on unaccented expensive extensive biography of sacajawea using her life story to illuminate the wider history of the Northern Plains and rockies. Elizabeth fenn is also the author with peter h wood of natives and newcomers, the way we live in North Carolina before 1770, a Popular History of early North Carolina, which appeared in 1983. With no further ado, i would like to welcome elizabeth fenn. [applause] elizabeth thank you all for coming today. Is a real privilege to share this most american of stories with you. Some of you may feel a bit disconcerted as you look at the title of my book because you are not quite sure who the mandan indians are. You know, mandan does not have ring of cherokee or comanche or seminal, 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 discovery, spent the winter of 1804 and 1805 among the mandan on outbound portion of their famous transcontinental journey. So the mandan work as 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 and tremendous 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. 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 with here 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 accounts 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 a backupomen, they had plan. They turned to fast underground vast underground caches of dried corn, beach, squash, Sunflower Seeds that they kept on hand for trade and such emergencies. Tallied upsts have almost 70,000 bushels of underground Storage Capacity in the pits of a single mandan village. 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. Benchmark, a bushel is eight gallons of capacity. 1 bushel of dried shelved maze ize weighs 56 pounds. So think about 70,000 bushels. The mandan life accommodated the unpredictability of the 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 mostmbles the striking visible features, the discernible trenches that still form the boundaries of this town. So when youre looking image , think of a trench thats 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. It 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 dimensions, double ditch was much larger than scholars had recognized. Surveys suggest another nearby town, larson, also had two additional fortification trenches detected through radiology technology. 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 . Well, it seems likely as the that the heart river towns numbered as many as 15,000 in population at their pinnacle. This would have probably been around the 1500s. Then in the late 1500s, something happened. Of the villagers abandoned those outer two ditches. And the town shrank to 15 acres. Reduction in a 20 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 increase. D. Or mandan numbers may have overwhelmed the carrying capacity of the land they occupied. Or perhaps think uttered or perhaps they encountered droughts. Droughts where 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 pests, but pestilence. Far to the south, wave after wave of sickness spread north out of mexico in the aftermath smallpox assisted of the aztecs. 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 fews, maybe if you a 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. Plain life was in a people again due to the arrival of the horse. Another new species to the americas. The horse was really reintroduced to the americas and people embraced the horses after new mexicos revolt made them more widely acceptable widely accessible. And horses then spread northward through the 1700s. Mandans probably got there first horses around the years 1740. Horses, as you can imagine, that meant more frequent interaction between people than ever before. Imagine the great plains in the absence of the horse, the pedestrian era. Horses meant more frequent interaction and also hauled or carried much more than dogs or humans ever could. They carried trade items, food, people, tepees. But they also carried a visible 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 s ioux, rating and trading raiding and trading among the upper missouri villagers carried a villagers. Carried through the winter. Bearing an overlay of dots like used to designate a smallpox rash. By bellyacheented indeed one of the symptoms or indeed one of the symptoms or, the early symptoms of smallpox. We know that they traded and raided with the mandan, 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 173435. Double ditch in 1500 had contained 160 homes, 2000 people. By the mid1700s, they 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 its transitt 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 tribe, the villagers 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 river and the missouri. And those heart river villages, traditional villages once home to thousands, became ghost towns. Lewis and clarke passed through 23 years after this epidemic and they mapped the empty townsite as they traveled upstream. Essentially what happened is that the mandan and their northerly neighbors went from living in a configuration of this, tot looked like 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 19 , 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 trade andal points of commerce, the river villages, the mandan villages also became andl points of contagion the areas become abundant for the people with whom they traded. 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 up mice were very destructive and that they gnawed clothing and other manufacturers to pieces. But, deer mice really borough, so deer mice left those borough 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 rat. Is a lovely for the mandan, the site of a 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 varying devouring a deer mouse they were delighted. , perhaps, if these new creatures multiplied they would rid their earth lodges of the bothersome deer mice to read , 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 of side, the norway they spendrbers and much of their life beneath the surface of the earth. And this aspect of rat ecology combined with their reproductive rates, came together to create a dreadful consequence. The underground caches were no match for the rats. And with a seemingly bottomless storehouse of maize to consume 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 lodges buckled and collapse. D, 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. Excerpts here. E 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 dockingalking 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 would. Od. Mandan consumed plenty of wood on their own. Steamboats were in a different league. A small steamer like the yellowstone needed the equivalent of 6010 trees for each day of travel. The boats inevitably reloaded with wood where it was in short andly as early as 1833 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, 20 plenty of bison. Why didnt the mandan go hunt them . They didnt go hunt them because the sioux were nearby. Their enemies were nearby. So the mandan faced a three dimensional problem in the winter of 1836 and 37. Their corn was too meager. The rats are eating it. Sioux were too close in the 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 lodge dwellers, the entire tribe perhaps as many as 2000 people , sought shelter with the mandan s 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 man a young mandan died today of the smallpox he wrote on july 14. Several others have caught it. Pox ripped the 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 mandan 300 command and mandan survived. Think about this. The year was 1837, the mandan the famous indian wars of the west had barely begun. Manifest destiny had yet to be fined. Coined. Railroaders and homesteaders i get to arrive. There was no violence between european americans. But, event 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 show less text 00 31 14 unidentified speaker that was left out by writers by genetic reviewers so you can point out that in this date this thing happened and in this date this thing happened . Its very hard to pin down exact dates for the early 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 demand and 70, there were two upgrades of smallpox. I can speculate that they were hit in 1781. Epidemicsademics are easier to track. We had the st. Peters to watch, copper bid dropping smallpox up and down the Missouri River. Do they allow researchers to go into the gravesites . Now. These are protected sites, as well they should be. Until the damning along the Missouri River, archaeological sites were being flooded out. There were excavations on this. Thank you. In your pictures of the devil ditch village, there was a housing thing, was at a privately owned . No, it is one of my favorite Historic Sites on the planet. It fires up your imagination. That is the stone structure that you see on the site. Because new signage archaeology has discovered these additional ditches and the new signage explains it. It is a breathtaking site. If you are ever in north dakota, be sure to go there. It is well worth it. After the mandan moved north, how did they interact . They were allies but they didnt always get along. We can they go comparable cases for the uniteds dates today. Whenever they threatened, you could count on the others to collaborate and send them off. There were some conflicts and the othens er tribe. They were protecting their bison hunting territories. Could you add a couple of additional comments about the relationships with other tribes to their stay in that part of america . Mentioned, they were the hub of commerce on the planes. I described them as walmart but not tacky. If you can imagine arapahos, the planes were teaming with people and this was the destination. A mandan arrived at village, even if you were an enemy, once you were within the walls, you were safe. They could war with people one day and the next day be trading with them. They were the constant perennial enemies, other people were constant friends. It blew hot and cold over 15 i have a question that emerges from this picture that mobilityed, a place of and a place of movement. There is this notion that these people could have left and gone elsewhere and created new communities in the face of this epidemic disease. Suggestion or evidence that people migrated elsewhere as a result of this russian mark that is a great question. During these big epidemic of race the question would have been where to go. Petulance was so ubiquitous, so widespread, there was no safe place. The point you make is very significant because it is pertinent to us today. If there is a smallpox outbreak, would you rather be in washington dc . In north dakota . In washington dc, you are a sitting duck, the transmission is just so much easier. Their population is so compressed inside their villages. When it struck, everybody would get sick. 1837 epidemic, baxley tested out the nomadic lifestyle for a while. They spent several years, these are called the lost years of the man dan. Move. Pent years on the eventually they returned to the Missouri River and formed a village called like episode. It was formed in 1845, they joined them a little later but they did experiment with a different life way. Nomadic peoples were not so severely affected as the man dancewear. It is one of the reasons that the people were able to overrun them as they migrated westward as the plane. Did they have their own language and do we have their writtenom their own or even verbal stories . They do have their own language. There is a gentleman named edwin benson who must be about 19 years old. They may tape recordings and taught younger people the language. Is a bigan language language group. To the sioux language. Anthropologists have recorded creation stories, the stories of the landscape. They were recording a single memorable event for each winter. All of these features on the the tales, the history that makes them a people , their foundational ceremony which is incidentally the origins of the point of sundance, they keep a ceremony happening every year and it was essentially a reenactment of their history. I was wondering about the picture in front of us. What you see there, those scooped out places where once the sides of earth lodges. You will see smaller, circular marks in the soil and those are usually the locations of brain caches. It was wiped out by the smallpox epidemic of 1837. A couple years after they took over it was burnt to the ground by the sioux. They rebuild it from scratch. I presume this is the. They have been bred to survive this. I am wondering what particular agricultural techniques they developed that enable them to have a driving agricultural society. They have a story of a founding figure who taught them how to grow maize and just the women were phenomenal farmers. Indigenous a debt to foodways. They grew probably 13 or so varieties of corn. Each variety for a different purpose. Plant in how to different areas on a plot because of prevailing winds causing certain patterns across thenization to develop particular crosses that they wanted. The women were just phenomenal agriculturalist area two more minutes. What was the nugget that you learned about the tribe that prompted you to write a book about them . I am an early american historian. The Early American History that i grew up with we didnt even talk about the spanish colonies. We talked about the mayflower. Colonies, the progress westward. Book i comeallpox across this is population of the middle of north dakota. What if we told the story of early america from the center of a continent . What if we counted all of the people as americans . This is American History and this is the quintessential american story. On history bookshelf, here from the countrys bestknown American History writers of the past decade. You can watch any of our programs at any time, you can visit our website cspan. Org history. You are watching American History tv. Im not askinga, anyone to optimize their values or beliefs, and asking them to open their eyes to other people so you can figure out your place in this infinite world. Brooke gladstone is the cohost and managing editor on the media. Book thesses her trouble with reality. She looks at what constitutes reality today and how that right. Has changed over the years. I set up our biological wiring and i wanted to show how we have involved culture that was and not to validate us to challenge of us, not the cop certainly not to contradict us, he gave us the illusion that our realities were watertight when really they were riddled places thatots and would crunch in. Sunday night at 8 00 eastern on cspan q a. He compares the literature, clothing, music and worldview of the beatniks of the 1950s to the hippies of the 1960s, here is created. Countercultures are most identify with the word of hippie. Broaderterculture is than that, it includes many people that would not have identified as hippie, including the beats. The beat poet gary snyder put the matter about these very physically when the hippies were living at the philosophy that the beats proclaimed. That is how snyder saw the connection between the two. What was the relationship between beats and hippies . There was a major age difference. The beats were in their 20s in world war ii, the hippies were in their 20s in the 1960s. The hippies were young enough to have been the children of the beats if the beats had had any children, it was not very likely. They were veterans of the Great Depression and world war ii, the holocaust, the atomic age, the hippies were the up the mystic children of the babyboom generation and the rising affluence of the postwar consumer boom. That said a lot about the difference between the two, the fact that one had been raised amid the poverty and despair of the depression and beer of world war ii. You can watch the entire program at 8 00 p. M. And again at midnight eastern. American history tv, only on cspan3. Night, only steve jobs can sell this product and be associated with it when that is just a shade of the story. He was handson, he had a lot to do with it but the truth is that even the iphone would have never happened without scores of people working around the clock. Busy editor brian merchant on the creation and development of the iphone and his book the one device. Part of the story is that the the softwarern as interaction paradigm and was born designed steve jobss back. It started basically experimenting. It was fun, it was wild stuff. They had a projector rig that they had to hack different products together and see what would become become the iphone. President wilson signed the Selective Service id on may 18 of 1917. 21 tot required men aged register for military service. Up next, the centennial of Selective Service. The military service became voluntary. Good evening and welcome to the National World war i museum and memorial. I and the curator of education, and it is my absolute pleasure
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