“Some brave young men, listening, thought they knew Yellow Elk’s voice. They went to the burying ground and called, ‘Are you alive, Yellow Elk?’
“‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘I have waked up!’
“The young men rolled the logs from his body and bore Yellow Elk to the village; he was too weak to walk.”
This story of Yellow Elk I thought wonderful; but it scared me to know that my great-grandfather had been to the ghost land and had come back again.
Enemies gave our tribes much trouble after the smallpox year, my grandmother said. Bands of Sioux waylaid hunting parties or came prowling around our villages to steal horses. Our chiefs, Mandan and Hidatsa, held a council and decided to remove farther up the Missouri. “We will build a new village,” they agreed, “and dwell together as one tribe.”
The site chosen for the new village was a place called Like-a-Fishhook Point, a bit of high bench land that jutted into a bend of the Missouri. We set out for our new home in the spring, when I was four years old. I remember nothing of our march thither. My mothers have told me that not many horses were then owned by the Hidatsas, and that robes, pots, axes, bags of corn and other stuff were packed on the backs of women or on travois dragged by dogs.
The march was led by the older chiefs and medicine men. My grandfather was one of them. His name was Missouri River. On the pommel of his saddle hung his medicines, or sacred objects, two human skulls wrapped in a skin. They were believed to be the skulls of thunder birds, who, before they died, had changed themselves into Indians. After the chiefs, in a long line, came warriors, women, and children. Young men who owned ponies were sent ahead to hunt meat for the evening camp. Others rode up and down the line to speed the stragglers and to see that no child strayed off to fall into the hands of our enemies, the Sioux.
The earth lodges that the Mandans and Hidatsas built, were dome-shaped houses of posts and beams, roofed over with willows-and-grass, and earth; but every family owned a tepee, or skin tent, for use when hunting or traveling. Our two tribes camped in these tents the first summer at Like-a-Fishhook Point, while they cleared ground for cornfields.
The labor of clearing was done chiefly by the women, although the older men helped. Young men were expected to be off fighting our enemies or hunting buffaloes. There was need for hunting. Our small, first year’s fields could yield no large crops; and, to keep from going hungry in the winter months, we must lay in a good store of dried meat. We owned few guns in the tribe then; and hunting buffaloes with arrows was anything but sport. Only young men, strong and active, made good hunters.