In the summer of 1837, a great death attacked the Mandan towns. It was the small pox. The Sioux hedged the towns so closely that there was no escape into the prairie. The Mandan men, women and children, thus herded together, died by hundreds.
Mahtotohpa was among the last left. He witnessed all his family and friends stretched cold and lifeless, and he decided to try a sacrifice to the anger of the Great Spirit.
So he dragged his wives and children together and covered them decently with buffalo robes. Then he went out to a little hill, and laid himself down, with a vow not to eat or drink, if the Great Spirit would stay the plague.
On the sixth day he was very weak; but he crept back to his lodge, and again laid himself down, in a robe, beside his family. And on the ninth day, he, too, died.
However, the plague was not stayed for many days. Of the sixteen hundred Mandans in the two towns, only thirty-one remained alive; of all the Mandan nation there were scarce above one hundred; and today they number about one hundred and fifty.
CHAPTER XVIII
A SEARCH FOR THE BOOK OF HEAVEN (1832)
THE LONG TRAIL OF THE PIERCED NOSES
The Nez Percés or "Pierced Noses" really were not Pierced Noses any more than any other Indians; for the North American red men, the country over, wore ornaments in their noses when they chose to.