Mandan

• As North America's original trail blazers, the earliest entrepreneurs began travelling along familiar routes to the nearest neighbor. In time though, virtually all tribal groups became aware of a world beyond their immediate territories....Eventually a loose trade network spanned the entire continent, with routes typically following rivers and moving across or around bodies of water. Mandan villages on the Missouri River were magnets for commerce in buffalo robes, deer hies, dried foods, flint, and craft items. They were settled at crossroads along familiar trails travelling from the north, east, west and south.
  
• About AD 1400 one the most concentrated population center was the along the upper Missouri River in North Dakota where the forebears of the Mandan dwelled (who were soon joined by the early Hidatsa bands).
  
  The prime location for a village was a bluff or high terrace overlooking a stream-the better to spy buffalo herds in the distance, to gauge the level of the spring runoff, or to see if women out berrying or fetching water were in danger from bears or enemy tribesmen. Equally important, lookouts could watch for flocks of blackbirds that might threaten the life-sustaining gardens along the lower river terraces. There, using hoes made by lashing the shoulder blades of buffalo to wooden handles, women tended family gardens of corn, beans, squash, amaranth, and sunflowers. Occupied continuously during the summer growing season, the villages were used only part-time in the fall and winter, when hunting parties were away for long periods on buffalo hunts.
  
  To construct homes, a basic frame of heavy posts and beams cut from the towering stands of cottonwood along the river valley was roofed and walled with a tightly packed layer of smaller poles. A matting of buffalo grass followed, capped by a think layer of sod or mud. The builders made these lodges snug for winter by excavating the floors slightly and insulating the entry tunnel with earth. Underneath their floors people dug deep, bottle-shaped cellars for storing the dried products of their fields during the howling winter month.
  
  Women were in charge of the domestic arena as well as the garden plots. One or two families related through the female line lived in each lodge. Couples slept in booths ranged around the lodge perimeter, their babies safely bound in cushioned cradleboards. Common household goods included hardwood mortars and pestles for pounding corn, ceramic pots, and buffalo-horn utensils. Provisions and extra clothing were stored on drying racks and in storage nooks around the perimeter of the lodge. One corner might house a clan shrine-a small raised platform holding family icons-which children were taught to treat with respect. Smoke from a centrally placed fire blackened the ceiling but also inhibited insect infestation of the sod roof. Early chroniclers visiting earth-lodge villages commented favorably on their orderliness and cleanliness.
  
  As successful communities began crowding along the riverfront, struggles over available farmland followed, causing villagers to barricade themselves behind protective log palisades and dry moats. Within these walls ceremonial plazas opened up, and some buildings appear to have been devoted exclusively to ceremonial purposes.
  
• By the early 1700's, among the much sought after products on the Plains were European-made glass trade beads in brilliant colors. These "pony" beads, and later, smaller "seed" beads replaced the more subtle, vegetable-dyed bird or porcupine quill decorations that Plains Indian women had traditionally used to embellish clothing and household items. Resplendent panels of beadwork began to appear on men's war shirts, leggings, moccasins, armbands and headbands, and on the pipe bages that they hung from their waistbands.
  
  Initial trade contact with the English and French had occurred by the mid-1700's. The Mandan would come to call the white man "he who has everything," and they wanted what he had. By the early 1800's, axes, knives, awls, flint-and-shell kits, and brass kettles were becoming necessities of Plains Indian camp life. Extravagances such as pearl buttons and satiny ribbons were admired because they were pretty and colorful; ready-made trade woolens and calicoes not only were colorful but made life much easier for the women.
  
  Before long, the trading posts became hubs of commerical, social, and diplomatic interaction for many tribes. Here, in exchange for horses and buffalo meat, Indians could obtain coveted firearms. Sugar, flour, coffee, and liquor entered the native diet. Throughout the plains a growing dependence on these goods undermined traditional tribal cultures.
  
• Among the Cheyenne and other Plains tribes, artison "guilds" controlled the production of all quillwork and beadwork. Members controlled the highly specialized knowledge needed for certain techniques, and instruction required payment. Those women who were fortunate enough to possess such knowledge were paid well for their creations. A quilled robe made by a member of a quilling society, for example, could easily be traded for a pony from the Arapaho or the Mandan-Hidatsa. Ascending in order, there were membership divisions for the moccasins, baby cradles; stars for ornamenting lodges; buffalo robes; and lodge linings, back rests and parfleches.
  
• During the 1790's while other tribes were forming new alliances, the earth-lodging villages of the Mandan and Hidatsa clung to their older, more sedentary way of life. Like still centers amid the whirling changes in Plains Indian life surrounding them, their towns continued to produce and dry much-desired vegetables for trade and to practice rtuals that originated long before contact with the white man.
  
  Their large, well-kept villages and their hospitable attitude toward outsiders were remarked on by white visitors. The Frenchfur trader and explorer Pierre La Verendrye had visited one of their earlier villages near present-day Bismark in 1738 and commended the stout construction fo its enclosing palisade and the spaciousness of the earth lodges. Another trader named David Thompson passed through in 1790 and measured one of the earth lodges at 90 feet in diameter.
  
• By 1805 the world of the Mandan and Hidatsa had shrunk to five villages along the Knife River, where a trading post, Ft Clark, was constructed not long afterward. Here the artists George Catlin and Karl Bodmer disembarked in the 1830's and recorded a highly developed way of life that predated the coming of the horse. During his stay in the Mandan villages, George Catlin made friends with the Mandan's second-in-comand, a 32-year-old man named Mato-Tope, or Four Bears. While Catlin sketched the chief in many poses, Four Bears drew pictures of his war deeds. He had killed five enemy chiefs, as his own pictographic war shirt and painted buffalo robe vividly illustrated. The two men ate, talked, and smoked together in  Four Bears' earth lodge.
  
  No sooner had Catlin left for the East Coast than another artist, the Swiss watercolorist Karl Bodmer, arrived with an expedition led by Prince Maximilian du Weid. Again Four Bears had a painting partner and guest.
  
  Four Bears became chief of the Mandan in 1837, but his tenure was tragically short-lived. An American Fur Comapny steamboat that tied up that summer near the Mandan villages had a smallpox-infected crewman aboard. Despite warnings from the captain, some Indians boarded the vessel. Four Bears' hospitality to outsiders was no protection against the scourge that now struck with a vengeance.
  
  In just eight weeks, a population of 1,600 Mandans fell to 125. The disease spread to take half of the Hidatsas, who had just returned from their summer hunt, and many Arikaras, who had only recently come to live with the two tribes.
  
  Four Bears-his entire family having perished before his eyes, his own face ravaged by the disease-is reported to have commanded his people: "It will be the last time you will hear me. Think of your wives, children, brothers, sisters, friends...all are dead, or dying, with their faces all rotten, caused by these dogs the whites. Think of that, my friends, and rise together and leave not one of them alive." He died that afternoon. Traumatized, the remnants of the tribe moved upstream, following an old Mandan prophecy that they must never descend the river to construct a new life.
  
  
• While the Indian wars with white America dragged on across the West, a remarkable community was flourishing as a peaceful hub of commerce on the Upper Missouri River in North Dakota. In 1837, Hidatsa survivors of a devastating small pox epidemic began moving upstream and by 1844 had rebuilt their old-style earth lodges on a bluff overlooking a sharp bend of the river called "mua-iduskupe-hises", or "Like-a-Fishhook". Soon they were joined by about 250 Mandan surivors of the same epidemic, seeking shelter behind Like-a-Fishhook's protective stockade. In 1845 a fur company built a log trading post called Ft Berthold on the village's north side.
  
  The location proved so advantageous for trading with Plains tribes that, by 1849, Like-a-Fishhook was said to have more inhabitants than any town in the new Minnesota Territory. In 1862, the Arikara, battered by constant Sioux attacks, joined the thriving community and for the next 20 years these three tribes-all with corn-growing, earth-lodge-building, highly ceremonial village traditions-kept alive a bygone era. Along the river, women continued to till the alluvial flood plain and observe rituals that kept the agricultural cycle on its proper course. The men built fish weirs, hunted deer and buffalo, and did business at the trading post.
  
  The advent of land allotment in the 1880's brought an abrupt end to all this; villagers were soon scattered over a 50-mile span on individual homesteads, their earth lodges torn down lest anyone be tempted to return. The community has endured; they are known today as the Three Affiliated Tribes of the Ft Berthold Reservation. But the original village site lies hidden now beneath a lake created in 1954 by the Garrison Dam, built, over tribal protests, by the US government.
  
  

Menominee

• The country of the Menominee, the Wild Rice People, laid north of the Winnebago, on the northeast corner of Lake Michigan around Green Bay.
  
• Despite myriad differences in local customs, the peoples of the Great Lakes region were part of the same larger social order. Except where the growing season was too short, they all raised the storable staples: corn, beans, squash, and gourds. The spring and fall fish runs and the sap from the sugar maple were as important as a corn patch; dried blueberries would last through the winter. Wild rice was especially abundant along the Wisconsin-Minnesota border. To the north, where long winters discouraged farming, the people were mainly hunters, fishermen, and traders.
  
• The people of the Upper country loved children, and the villages teemed with them. Among this group, a child was born into the father's clan. Clan affiliation remained a primary source of personal identity-though everone had his or her own given name and sometimes several others acquired over a lifetime.
  
  Pampered by their parents, indulged by a sprawling network of more distant relatives, children learned by storytelling and example rather than physical punishment. Grandparents were the principal teachers. Among the lessons of the elders was the value of generosity and sharing. Hoarding was deplored, and status was measured by how much a man gave away rather than how much he could accumulate.
  
  At puberty every young woman knew she must begin retiring to the women's hut during her menstrual cycle. And every young man, after proper preparation, moved off to a secluded spot for fasting and prayer in hopes of receiving a vision that would become his guardian spirit for the rest of his life.
  
• In May of 1763, Pontiac, an Ottawa who envisioned an Indian confederation spanning the forests and valleys from the Great Lakes to the Missisisppi, made his move. Leading a multitribal force that included Ojibwa, Potawatomi, non-Christian Huron, and Menominee-as well as his own Ottawa-he laid siege to the British garrison at Detroit. Within a matter of weeks eleven frontier British forts had fallen to allied Indian warriors. The attacks came so swiftly that often the defenders had no idea a rebellion had begun. At Ft Sandusky, on Lake Erie, the raiders simply asked for a meeting with the commander, then seized control.
  
  By July only two besieged garrisons-Ft Pontchartrain at Detroit and Ft Pitt at the forks of the Ohio-still held out. To relieve Ft Pitt, Lord Amherst sent a task force of 450 veteran soldiers under Col Henry Bouquet. Then, on his instructions, the fort commander invited the Delaware attackers to parley and presented them with a handkerchief and two blankets that had been infected with smallpox. Amherst's sinister experiment-perhaps the first use of germ warfare in American history-accomplished its goal. The epidemic spread through the Indian ranks and into their villages along the Ohio Valley. By autumn the siege had collapsed.
  
• After the War of 1812, for the native people of the Great Lakes, the experience was less traumatic for them than their southern neighbors. The opening of the Erie Canal in the 1830's produced a modest influx of newcomers, but the Americans arriving by that route-New Yorkers and New Englanders whom the Indians call Saganash (Englishmen) or Bostonais-proved relatively easy neighbors. Most important, American financiers were more interested in lumbering and mining around the Great Lakes than in land development. The north country was too sandy, swampy, or rocky for prosperous farming, and so the Ojibwa, Ottawa, Menominee, and Winnebago and many Potawatomi were left comparatively undisturbed until after the Civil War. Even then, despite some shifting around, Great Lakes groups manged to stay close to their traditional homelands.
  

Miami

• Despite the name, the Miami lived in the northeastern corner of Indiana, south of Lakes Michigan and Erie. The home territory centered at what is now Ft Wayne, a strategic location at a portage point to the Wabash River. The Miami maintained generally unfriendly relations with their western neighbors, the Illinois.
  
• The lifestyle of the Miami were basically the same as all the other Great Lakes tribes. (See the second and third bullet points of the Menominee above.) The Great Lakes Indians developed an extensive knowledge of plant medicine. There were medicines to attract animals to traps and snares and to lure fish; love medicines, cures for respiratory problems and a whole catalog of human ailments, as well as contraceptives and abortion-inducing medications, insect repellents, and cures for poison ivy and snakebite.
  
• No great domains or chieftains controlled the Upper Country; each village was an independent community. A village leader was selected, usually by a council of elders, on merit alone. Proven ability in hunting and warfare, courge, stamina, and generosity-these were valued traits. So too, was skill as an orator. Since no village leader could force a path of action, he often needed to exhort, inspire, and cajole. Decisions were made by consensus, with a highly formalized (and time-consuming) system of debate. On questions of war and peace, talks could consume days on end. A minority faction might move to another village or even join a different tribe.
  
  Villages usually had a separate war leader, and joining a war party was a matter of choice. Even so, warfare was the bone and sinew of life in the region, deemed essential for sharpening the survival skills of the entire society. The ball games and running competitions of peacetime trained the young men of the village in attack and rapid retreat. Even small children were periodically deprived of food and water in order to inure them to the rigors of forced marches.
  
• The Miami were attacked by the Iroquois League during the Beaver Wars of the mid 17th century. The Miami pushed into southwestern Wisconsin, forming a loose coalition with the Fox, Kickapoo, and Mascouten. One contingent of the Shawnee refugees moved west to the Illinois country, jining a huge intertribal community of 18,000 people that was gathering around newly established Ft St. Louis on the upper Illinois Rvier, at present-day Peioria. They settled in among Miamis, Illinois, and a number of others, all prepared to defend themselves against any new assault.
  
  Then little by little, the balance began to shift. When Iroquois raiders thrust into Illinois in 1684, combined native forces from Ft St Louis turned them back....The Miami and related tribes began returning to the Wabash River country.
  
• As the bloodshed abated in the Upper Country, the governors of New France took advantage of the lull to consolidate their position. Ambassadors went out from Montreal, inviting all the tribes to gather for a mass celebration of friendship and peace. Prisoners would be exchanged, and all remaining quarrels put to rest....The Iroquois councils deliberated in their unhurried, consensus-building manner for a full two years, weighing the pros and cons with their English patrons. Then they, too, decided to accept the proposed French accord.
  
  Finally the day arrived. In midsummer of 1701 the canoes started landing on the beach at Montreal-Sauk, Fox, and Winnebago, Potawatomi and Miami, spiky-haired Huron and feathered Ojibwa, buckskin-clad Kickpoo, and Sioux in their eagle fathers and buffalo robes. In addition to these French-allied tribes came their former enemies, the Five Nation of the Iroquois League-Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oenida, Mohawk.
  
  Close to 1,300 people attended, representing 39 separate tribes, and together they feasted and parleyed and smoked the calumet. The delegates worked out some last-minute details. Then on August 4 everyone assembled in a newly built courtyard just outside the city to hear the final orations and witness the signing of a treaty that officially ended decades of intertribal war in the Upper Country.
  
• At the onset of the French and Indian War, one of the first clashes was a French attack on a British trading post at Pickawillany, newly opened for business among the Miami in western Ohio. By reaching this far west, the British were, in effect, expanding their American empire into the realm of New France-and this the French could not allow. So in 1752 a force of Ottawa and Ojibwa warriors under French command swept down and obliterated the post, killing a British trader and 13 Miami defenders. They seized the Miami leader, La Demoiselle, and -as the chronicle puts it-"made a broth" of him.
  
• Before the gun smoke had cleared from the last Revolutionary War battles, settlers were again streaming west across the mountains. By 1780 the forests of Kentucky and Tennessee resounded with the crash of falling tress as more the 50,000 Americans began clearing farmland and building towns. In Ohio, where few white people had lived before, land speculators were busy surveying tracts along the Muskingum River. More than 45,000 people would surge into Ohio over the next two decades; another 5,000 pushed on into Indiana. Not surprisingly, the onslaught provoked a reaction.
  
  Serious resistance was offered by a new coalition-militant factions of Ottawa, Wyandot, Shawnee, Potawatomi, Ojibwa, Miami, and others who were determined to maintain control of their villages and hunting grounds. Indian raids between 1783 and 1790 took the lives of as many as 1,500 settlers.
  
  The new American government could not tolerate these losses, and in 1790 President Washington ordered his commander in the Northwest Territory (as the Americans now called the region) to put a stop to them. So Gen Josiah Harmer set out from Ft Washington, at present-day Cincinnati, with nearly 1,500 troops. Harmer had served with distinction during the Revolution, but in this campaign he managed to stumble disastrously.
  
  His downfall was engineered by a brilliant Miami leader-Michikinikwa, or Little Turtle, principal chief of the tribal coalition.  Little Turtle was careful to avoid direct confrontations, relying instead on surprise jabs and deceptive tactics. His warriors abandoned their villages and feigned retreat, luring Harmer's soldiers ever deeper into the forest. The Americans were soon weary, short of supplies-and ripe for the taking: in October 1790 Little Turtle caught them in a pair ambushes that inflicted 200 casualties and scattered the rest.
  
  After this unexpected setback, Wasington dispatched his army's highest-ranking soldier, Maj Gen Arthur St Clair, to try again. St Clair set out in the fall of 1791with 2,300 men, many of them raw recruits. As they marched through Ohio in pursuit of the Miami leader, he detached some of the troops to build new forts; others deserted. On November 3, with only about 1,400 men remaining, St Clair made camp on a plateau overlooking the Wabash River in Indiana.
  
  The position was dangerously exposed-and Little Turtle made the most of it. Early the next morning, 1,000 warriors rushed in on three sides and overwhelmed the sleep-dazed Americans. Many dropped their weapons and ran; some cowered in prayer. Few escaped. When the carnage was over, 650 Americans lay dead and nearly 300 more wounded. In the annals of Indian warfare, "St Clair's Shame" would take its place as the greatest loss ever suffered by American troops.
  
• Furious at St Clair's ineptitude and pressured bycalls for help fromdesperate frontier settlements, Washington turned to Gen Anthony Wayne-"Mad Anthony", his men called him-to do the job right. Determined to avoid the mistakes of his rpedecessors, Wayne recruited a 2,000 man force and spent a fullyear training it.  He also added 1,000 mounted Kentucky sharpshooters and a detachment of Chickasaw and Choctaw scouts, traditional enemeies of the Great Lakes tribes.
  
  On learning that the British were supplying the Indians with food and firearms, Wayne prepared to attack. Before he could move, a band of Ottawa fighters hit Ft Recovery in June 1774-only to be repulsed by heavy cannon fire. It was the coalition's first defeat. In council meetings afterward, Little Turtle laid out the new realities. The American forces had grown so large, he said, that further resistance would be futile; better to withdraw and seek some sort of accommodation.
  

"We have beaten the enemy every time; we cannot expect the same good fortune always to attend us. The Americans are now led by a chief who never sleeps. In spite of the watchfulness of our braves, we have never been able to surprise him. There is someting that whispers to me that it would be prudent to listen to offers of peace."-Little Turtle-Miami

With that, he handed overall leadership of the confederacy's 1,500 warriors to Shawnee chief Blue jacket, his close ally in the campaign. From now on, Little Turtle would lead only his 250 Miamis.

Blue Jacket faded north into the rugged country west of Lake Eire, near the British garrison of Ft Miami. In a deep ravine on the Maumee River strewn with the trunks of trees uprooted by a recent tornado, he set up an ambush. His men performed the rites of fasting and prayer observed by Shawnee warriors before every battle. Then they waited. And they waited some more.

Wayne led his soldiers slowly up the trail in pursuit, intentionally delaying his arrival by three days.  On August 20, 1794, as Blue Jacket's half-starved fighters began drifting off to hunt for food, Wayne attacked-sweeping in so quickly that he earned the Shawnee name Big Wind. The warriors fell back to Ft Miami, hoping for help from their British allies. It never came: the British commander, ordered to stay out of the fighting, bolted the door to the stockade. Hundreds were slaughtered.


• So ended the Battle of Fallen Timbers, the last major clash of what history remembers as Little Turtle's War. The following summer, 1,130 chiefs and warriors assembled at Ft Greenville, Ohio, to make peace with the US. The price they paid was bitterly high: the Ohio River borderland, so long coveted by Yankee land developers, would be opened up to white settlement.
  
  Little Turtle, meanwhile, continued to advise cooperation. Lionized by the Americans whose armies he had twice vanquished, he traveled to Philadelphia to shake hands with Pres Washington and have his portrait painted by the illustrious Gilbert Stuart. Retiring on a government stipend, he lived out his days in a house on the Maumee River built for him by the governor of the Indiana Territoy. Death came in 1812 from gout, usually considered a white man's disease.