French Pathfinders in North America

by William Henry Johnson

When we read Lewis and Clark's account of the Mandans, we are in quite another atmosphere, not that of romance but of simple reality. They spent several months among them, on the friendliest terms, and they speak kindly of them, but do not disguise the brutality of savage life. Between these two authorities we have ample information, from opposite points of view.

The first thing that would impress a visitor with the fact that he had come among a peculiar people, is the character of their dwellings, absolutely unlike any used by any other tribe, either of the woods or plains, except their near neighbors and friends, the Minitarees. The lodge is a circular structure, set in an excavation about two feet deep. A framework of stout posts supports a roof of poles converging toward the centre, where an opening is left for the entrance of light and the escape of smoke. On these poles brush is spread, and over this earth is laid to the depth of about two feet. In this earth grass grows abundantly, and thus a Mandan village presents the appearance of an assemblage of green mounds.

Lewis and Clark were much impressed with the fearlessness of the Mandan women in crossing the Missouri, even when it was quite rough, in a tub-like boat consisting of a single buffalo-hide stretched under a frame-work of wicker.[1] Catlin saw the same boat in use, and it afforded him confirmation for a peculiar theory which he advanced.

He was much surprised at the light complexion of the Mandans generally and at the fact that he actually saw some blue eyes and gray eyes among them and some whitish hair. These circumstances seemed to him to point clearly to an admixture of European blood. He wrote at a time when fanciful theories about the native Americans were much in vogue. He had read somewhere that a Welsh prince, Madoc, more than two hundred years before the time of Columbus, sailed away from his country with ten ships. By some unexplained process, he traced him to America. Then he supposed him to ascend the Mississippi as far as the mouth of the Ohio and there to found a colony. This, being entirely cut off from communication with the mother country, was compelled to ally itself with the nearest Indians and took wives among them. From these unions sprang a mixed race, the Mandans, who eventually formed a separate tribe and were gradually driven up the Missouri to the point where he found them.

There is not any doubt of the large admixture of European blood among the Mandans, and it is easily accounted for. Catlin does not seem to have known of any white visitors before Lewis and Clark. But we have seen that the Vérendryes reached these people a full hundred years before Catlin's day. There is every reason for believing that, from that time, white hunters and traders never ceased to visit them. These Indians being, from the first, very hospitable and friendly, their villages were favorite resorts for fur-traders, who took up their abode among them for several years at a time and married there. One can easily see that, in the course of a hundred years, there would be several generations of mixed blood, and that, through inter-marriages, there would probably be few families whose color would not be lighter in consequence. The persons whose peculiar whitish hair Catlin noticed, undoubtedly were albinos, a class of persons in whom the natural coloring of the hair is wanting and the eyes are red or pink.

The Mandans probably are nothing more than an interesting tribe of Indians who, through long intermingling with the white race, have undergone considerable lightening of their original color.

A year after Catlin's visit his Mandan friends experienced a frightful calamity. A trading steamboat brought the small-pox to them, and, as happened in the case of many other tribes in the West, its ravages were fearful. Not being protected by vaccination, and knowing nothing of the treatment of the disease, the poor creatures died horribly. Not a few, in the height of their fever, threw themselves into the Missouri and so found a quicker and easier death. Nearly the whole tribe perished.

The remnant, along with that of their long-time friends and neighbors, the Minitarees, may be found to-day at Fort Berthold, in North Dakota.

[1] We may remember that La Salle and his followers found Indians on the plains of Texas crossing rivers in boats made of buffalo-hide.