Mandan Pots

http://www.penn.museum/documents/publications/expedition/PDFs/50-3/Mitchell.pdf

These pots are unusual for their unique two-rim openings and the beautiful details. Click on the picture for more information. It's a .pdf file and may take awhile to load but it's worth it if you're curious about this exquisite art form.

Welsh Indians?

During the 17^th and 18^th century, it was believed that the Mandan Indians were part Welsh. They were considered “white Indians.” Thomas Jefferson had read about these Indians and wanted Lewis and Clark to find them.

In a PBS Interview, historian Dayton Duncan said this about the legends of the western United States:

“Well, it's odd. I mean, here's Jefferson, one of the smartest men of any age. He had, his library had more books about the West than any library in the world. And yet, what did those books tell him? They told him that there might be wooly mammoths wandering in the West. That there were mountains made out of salt. The volcanoes erupting. That there were Indians who had blue eyes and spoke a Welsh language. I mean, the West was a rumor, it wasn't a fact in Jefferson's mind, or in the mind of Europeans at that time.”

Why did some explorers think the Mandan were descendants of the Welsh? Besides the legend of Prince Madoc coming to the United States and intermarrying with the Indians, the boats the Mandans/Hidatsas and Arikaras built and used were very similar to the Welsh coracle. 

 

http://www.gesithas.co.uk/departed_friends/paul_coracle.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mandan_Bull_Boats_and_Lodges-_George_Catlin.jpg

But the boats weren’t the only thing similar. Some of these Indians had bluish-grey eyes and were taller than other tribes. Also, these natives were the only ones to build permanent dwellings that resembled those of Iron Age Wales:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundhouse_%28dwelling%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundhouse_%28dwelling%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mandan_lodge.jpg

But to jump to the conclusion that a people are blood relatives because their customs are similar is faulty logic. Roundhouse construction is found all over the world. And skin boat construction is also common in many different cultures. The coracle, umiak, canoe, and kayak are four other types of skin boats that were used by ancient humans to navigate waters and there are probably more we don't know about because skin boats disintegrated with time.

In 1796, the theory of the Mandans being Welsh was dispelled by Welsh explorer John Evans who wrote: “Thus having explored and charted the Missurie for 1,800 miles and by my Communications with the Indians this side of the Pacific Ocean from 35 to 49 degrees of Latitude, I am able to inform you that there is no such People as the Welsh Indians.”

We don't know if Jefferson had read this report or not. We do know he wanted Lewis and Clark to find them and report back about them if they discovered them. 

What about those blue eyes? Isn’t it possible that the Vikings had met and intermarried with the Mandan? Our history books aren’t all-knowing. We weren’t there and without written records, what happened prior to the 1600s in North America is speculative or based upon archaeological discoveries. But I do admit that the Mandan lodges remind me a great deal of the Viking dwellings at L'anse Aux Meadows that I researched for my book, O Canada! Her Story.

Catlin, an artist who painted many portraits of the Mandan, believed they were the “Welsh Indians” of folklore, descended from Prince Madoc and his followers who supposedly sailed to America from Wales in about 1170. This view was popular until the 1800s, and was revived again in the 1900s. In fact, the Daughters of the American Revolution believed the legend to such a degree that they erected a plaque on the shores of Alabama where Madoc was believed to have landed. 

The plaque is no longer there (due to lack of evidence to support its claim) but the last report I discovered about it was that it is being restored by the Daughters of the American Revolution to be put on display in one of their museums.

http://www.corndancer.com/fritze/fritze_040059/fritze053.html

We may never know how much European blood was mixed with Native Mandan blood at the time of Sacagawea’s journey. While it’s fun to speculate and think about, the thing I hope all students will remember is that no matter our heritage or ethnicity, it doesn’t change the fact that we all come from God, and that there are no such things as "pure races." Between wars and exploration, slave trades and arranged marriages, no one has only one blood line. Simply put, we are all one race. 

The human race. 

Map of Tribes

Source: Lewisandclarktrail.com

The above map contains educated guesses as to where the different Mandan and Hidatsa villages were located when Lewis and Clark visited them for the first time. As you can see, Sacagawea's village was on the Knife River, a tributary of the Missouri River. Also, notice the different spelling of her name: Sakakawea. There are three spellings recognized as correct: (1) Sacajawea (2) Sacagawea and (3) Sakakawea. All are acceptable. I will post more about this later.

The Society of the Black Mouths

Source: Wikimedia Commons

In the Mandan/Hidatsa/Minataree culture, there were men's societies similar to today's clubs or civic organizations. One of these societies was the Society of the Black Mouths. Members of this society were men who painted the bottom half of their mouth black, much like the above painting of a Minatare chief.

The societies each had their own dances, rattles, weapons, articles of clothing, body painting and hair style.

Societies were segregated by age. The Black Mouths were men in their 40s. When they became older they sold their membership and bought a membership in a higher society.

Two officers in this society carried "raven lances" into battle. If he was chased by the enemy he was to plant his lance in the ground and remain beside it to fight until killed or until a fellow tribesman pulled it out.


In the book, Waheenee, An Indian Girl's Story, a Hidatsa girl describes the Black Mouths as being bossy men who told the women when to clean up the village yard and inspected lodges to see how clean they were. Most of the women feared them and were submissive to them. The children feared them because of their bossy ways. If their orders were disobeyed, they punished the offenders by beating them or firing guns at their feet.

I thought this was an interesting detail of daily Hidatsa life and included it in my book about Sacagawea.

A Hidatsa Wedding

When Sacagawea married Charbonneau, she probably didn't have the type of ceremony a young Hidatsa woman would typically have had because she was a slave marrying a French fur trader.

When writing the book, Sacagawea, I had no way of knowing what her ceremony was like because it wasn't recorded. However, I do know that the caliber of the wedding in Hidatsa tradition depended on the status of the bride and her family. Much like it is in many cultures today. The more wealthy a family is, the more elaborate the wedding can be.

Betrothal happened sometimes in childhood, but it wasn't unusual for a young man to approach the father of the girl he admired and ask if he could marry her. The girl usually had no choice in the matter. She was brought up to trust her father's judgement and abide by his wishes.

For six days the mothers of the girl (Hidatsa men had more than one wife and the wives of the lodge were the mothers of the children) prepared feast foods for the wedding. On the sixth day the girl's family carried gifts and the feast foods to the groom's lodge.  The food may have been made of boiled dried green corn and ripe corn pounded to meal and boiled with beans.

Lewis and Clark Trail Blog

Inside the groom's lodge he sat on his bed that served as a couch during the day. The Hidatsa built beds off the floor on the outside walls of their lodge, very similar to how the Vikings fashioned their lodges.

The food was set near the fire. Gifts were exchanged. The groom may give horses to the bride's father and the bride's family may gift the groom with furs and horses. Generosity was a matter of pride. The Hidatsas wanted to give more valuable gifts than they received.

The women sat on the floor with their ankles to the right, the proper way for a Hidatsa woman to sit. The groom's mother might fill a wooden bowl with dried buffalo meat, pound it to a powder and mix it with marrow fat and offer it to the bride to eat. If the bride couldn't eat it all, she would fold it up in her robe and take it home. Hidatsa's always took any food they couldn't eat home with them. To not do so was an insult to the cook.

The groom's family would pack up the gifts given to the bride and take them to the bride's family lodge and present them to the bride's mother.

For the next two days the bride would busy herself decorating a couch/bed appointed as the marriage bed for the new couple in her father's lodge.

At the end of the second day, the bride's mother would tell her to go and call her husband, and to tell him that she wanted him to come to her father's lodge. The groom would go to the bride's father's lodge a few minutes after her request because young men didn't walk through the village with the woman they loved in the daytime as it was considered foolish.

After the groom spent the wedding night in the bride's father's lodge, he became a member of the bride's family, and the marriage ceremony was complete.