The Buffalo and Native Peoples on the Upper Missouri
As Described by the Early Historians,
Artists and Scientists
Written by John P. Joyce
George Catlin John James Audubon Prince Maximilian and Karl Bodmer
The American Prairie Reserve—A Catlin Plains Park
Edwin Denig — The Fur Trader-Historian:
The three streams, Cheyenne, Moreau and Grand River, approach more nearly to each
other than the rest. In most of the small streams forming these rivers beavers used to be
found in great abundance. Lately they have become very rare…Of all the rivers Grand River is
the largest, best wooded and best stocked with game. Buffalo are found along this river
when the rest of the country has none. Elk Grove through the large points in droves of
several hundred. Antelope in large bands cover the hills. The fertile coulees are the home
to blacktail deer and the woods that of red deer.
—Edwin Thompson Denig,
bourgeois (chief trader),
Fort Union,
Yellowstone-Missouri River confluence, 1856.[1]
By the time Edwin Denig wrote the above assessment in 1856 buffalo numbers had been in decline on the Northern Plains for two decades. This resulted from several cultural and ecological forces with the more notable decline due to the market for robes, tongues and hides. From the early 1830s to the late 1840s the trade in buffalo robes increased significantly. By then the buffalo’s skin had become the most marketable natural resource on the Great Plains. As early as 1846 Denig observed that the buffalo on the Northern Plains were becoming “rapidly more scarce.”[2]
For thousands of years the fate of the plains peoples had always been tied to the fate of the buffalo. They revered the buffalo as sacred brothers and sisters and put the buffalo at the center of their spiritual world. Buffalo herds had flourished during the Little Ice Age (roughly AD 1500-1800) from the resulting cooler, wetter climate more favorable for plains grass production. As a result, according to historian-authors, Dan Flores and Andrew C. Isenberg, there was an estimated twenty-eight to thirty-million buffalo on the Great Plains at the time of the 1804-06 Lewis and Clark expedition. North Dakota conceivably could have had a total buffalo population in the one-two million range at that time. North Dakota’s climate was temperate and its short and mixed grass (blue grama, buffalo, little bluestem, needle-and-thread grass) prairie distribution covered most of the state’s western two-thirds. The buffalo had a preference for short grasses due to their high ratio of protein to carbohydrates.[3]
According to western tree ring studies, after 1820-21 dryer, warmer conditions less favorable for grass ensued culminating in the great drought period of 1856-64. Dan Flores points out the research by anthropologist Reid Bryson led him to believe that climate change and other factors adversely impacted the buffalo numbers. This included negative influences such as prairie encroachment from settlers on the east and west margins of the plains, grass competition from other grazers such as wild horses, and the possible impact of diseases such as anthrax and bovine tuberculosis. Taken all together they could have had an overall reduction of Great Plains bison carrying capacity of 40-60%. By the time of the civil war, 1861-65, Flores estimates that buffalo numbers fell to ten to twelve million.[4]
The Little Ice Age also enabled wild horse numbers from the Spanish settlements of present-day Texas and New Mexico to increase and rapidly expand northward. By the mid-eighteenth century horses were common on the Northern Plains which enabled emerging woodland cultures from the Great Lakes Region such as the Assiniboine, Cheyenne, and Dakotas consisting of three divisions, Santee, Yankton-Yanktonai, and Teton. (today’s Dakota, Nakota, Lakota) All three divisions migrated to the prairie though it was the Tetons who adapted to full time nomadic hunting of migrating buffalo herds beyond the Missouri River. By 1805 the Cheyenne and Lakota were largely established west of the Missouri River in the vicinity of the Black Hills and the Powder River further west. Assiniboines hunted the country north of the Missouri and further west. Having an adequate supply of horses became critical for survival of the nomadic tribes. The Lakota acquired their horses from three sources: 1. trade, mainly with the Arikara 2. capturing wild horses 3. raiding enemy villages for horses.[5] Denig noted the fierce competition between Assiniboine, Blackfeet, Crow and Dakota war parties in raiding each others horses.[6]
Who was Edwin Denig? Originally from Pennsylvania and newly employed by the American Fur Company as a clerk, Denig traveled up the Missouri River from St. Louis in April,1833 on the company stern-wheeler steamboat, Assiniboin, to his assignment at Fort Pierre, located on the river’s west side near its confluence with the Bad River and across from present day Pierre, SD. While at Fort Pierre he likely would have have met and conversed with the German scientist and naturalist, Prince Maximilian of Wied, and his retained illustrator-artist, Karl Bodmer, both of whom had preceded Denig to Fort Pierre by two days on the side-wheeler, Yellow Stone. After five days at Fort Pierre while the Yellow Stone departed downstream for St. Louis loaded with “probably 7,000 buffalo hides” according to Maximilian, Maximilian and Bodmer resumed their ascent to Fort Union on the Assiniboin five days later. The Yellow Stone never returned again to the Upper Missouri due to the boat’s too deep six foot draft.
Fort Union is located opposite the Yellowstone - Missouri River confluence about fifteen miles southwest of present day Williston, ND. It was built in late 1828 by the Upper Missouri Outfit which a few years later morphed into the American Fur Company. Fort Union replaced Fort Floyd (1826-1830), a smaller post that was located on a now underwater terrace which faced the Missouri River about one mile southeast of the present White Earth-Missouri River confluence. It was built by James Kipp to trade with the Assiniboine who lived in the vicinity of the White Earth Valley and Souris Basin. Fort Union (1828-1867) became the most important trading post in the Upper Missouri fur trade serving as the major trade distribution and collection center for smaller posts that also traded with Native people such as the Cree, Crow and the Blackfoot Confederacy (the Pikuni or Piegan, Kainah or Blood, and Siksika or Blackfoot) and the Metis (people of Cree and/or Ojibway and French ancestry). By the spring of 1837 Denig transferred to Fort Union as a clerk and eventually became the bourgeois in 1848 with the retirement of Alexander Culbertson. [7]
Denig met and knew intimately many important visitors to Fort Union including the American artist and naturalist John James Audubon in 1843, Father De Smet and Swiss artist Rudolph Friedrich Kurz who clerked at Fort Union over the winter of 1850-51. Denig became a naturalist thanks in part to the influence of Audubon whom he assisted in collecting and preparing bird and animal specimens for scientific study. In 1849 he prepared skins and skulls of birds and mammals of the Upper Missouri for study which a year later were accepted for the collections of the Smithsonian Institution. Denig was also an avid reader whose books were brought upriver from St. Louis. According to ethnologist-author, John C. Ewers, Denig would certainly have been familiar with the writings of artist George Catlin, and naturalist-artist John James Audubon. Denig also had a German language copy of Maximilian’s limited journal entries published in Europe in 1843. He might have been prompted to write because of the excellent example of the ethnographic records of Maximilian. Denig’s good friend, Father De Smet, also encouraged him to write, and Denig responded with Five Indian Tribes of the Upper Missouri which was begun in semi-retirement in the mid-1850s. With the possible exception of Maximilian, Denig was the most qualified to write on the history and ethnology of the Native people of the Upper Missouri at the time. Additionally, his assessments of the buffalo fur trade over many years are essential for an understanding of its demise. Like Maximilian, Denig proved to be a keen observer of detail and a descriptive, sober writer who, over his years on the Upper Missouri, maintained an interest in learning the various tribal languages and customs, particularly of the Assiniboine and Cree. According to Ewers, though Denig could certainly be biased at times, he generally viewed Native people simply as “human beings,” an impression derived from intimately knowing many of them over several years. His stated reason to write Five Indian Tribes of the Upper Missouri in the mid-1850s was to “correct the prior errors of other observers who purported to describe the actual life and intellectual capacity of the Indians of North America.”[8]
However, Denig didn’t always get it right. Sahnish (Arikara) tribal member and former Grand Forks Herald columnist Dorreen Yellow Bird, sadly now deceased, tells an example of Denig’s cultural bias that she had come across while researching one of his publications several years before. Denig had offended her by writing that he observed Indian women walking the shores of the Missouri River with their skirts held up, which he interpreted as soliciting sexual favors. Yellow Bird later complained about Denigs biased opinion to some tribal elders They responded by laughter which wasn’t the repsonse she was expecting. The elders asked if she had ever worn a wet buckskin dress. Evidently she hadn’t. She was told a wet buckskin dress would weight ten times more than a dry dress and when dry would be stiff as a board!
Denig proved himself a historian though he wrote from memory at times and many of his dates were inaccurate. He was a self-taught anthropologist as evidenced by his creation of an Assiniboine vocabulary and his detailed report to the Bureau of Ethnology in 1854, Indian Tribes of the Upper Missouri which mostly focused on the Assiniboine people. Oddly enough, aside from documenting some basic cosmological beliefs, Denig’s report contained nothing pertaining to a spiritual connection between the buffalo and the Assiniboine people.[9] This was later cleared up by part Assiniboine, James Larpenteur Long (First Boy), who interviewed several reliable Assiniboine elders still living in the 1930s. To these elders the buffalo was more than an animal. It was the staff of life. They noted that medicine men relied on the powers of the Spirit Buffalo to help them perform their rituals better. Its name was given to children so they would be hardy and reach maturity quickly.[10] (I have learned in a generic sense that all Native Peoples saw animals as sacred and kin. They had ceremonies going back thousands of years per oral tradition which, they believed, would continue the emergence of the animals from the ground — until they didn’t.)
The Scientists and Artists:
George Catlin—1832
George Catlin, a lawyer who had little or no training as an artist, traveled up the Missouri River in 1832 from St. Louis to Fort Union on the company’s Yellow Stone, the first steamboat in history to reach Fort Union. He was followed a year later by Prince Maximilian and Karl Bodmer. Catlin was on the Upper Missouri for about five to six months staying at both Fort Union and Fort Clark (located 15 miles west of present-day Washburn, ND) plus a few weeks at Fort Pierre Chouteau. Catlin focused on creating vibrant native portraits, both male and female, as well as the prairie landscape and animals. He could be pushy to the point of exploiting many willing, though uncomfortable subjects— partly because he lacked the funds to pay them and more importantly medicine men in some tribes such as the Lakota predicted dire consequences for those Catlin caught on canvas. Catlin’s journal entries, though long-winded, revealed his across the board wonderment and enthusiasm with all that he was experiencing. He was mesmerized by the “soulmelting scenery.” He watched great herds of buffalo, antelope and elk roaming “a vast country of green fields, where the men are all red.”[11]
Catlin was criticized for being prone to exaggerate in his art and writings and for over-romanticizing Native people. Yet, he should be credited for being a man “ahead of his time” given his compassion for Native Americans.
Below, he recorded in his Letters and Notes Vol II an encounter with a large herd of buffalo near the mouth of the White River in South Dakota while making his way down the Missouri from Fort Union by “canoe” (it was a skiff) with two engages:
Near the mouth of the White River, we met the most immense herd crossing the
Missouri River—and from an imprudence got our boat into imminent danger
amongst them, from which we were highly delighted to make our escape. It was
in the midst of the “running season,” and we had heard the “roaring” (as it is called)
of the herd when we were several miles from them. When we came in sight, we
were actually terrified at the immense numbers that were streaming down the green
hills on one side of the river and galloping up and over the bluffs on the other. The
river was filled, and in parts blackened, with their heads and horns, as they were
swimming about…they had torn down the prairie bank of fifteen feet in height, so
as to form a sort of road….[12]
Catlin noted they were fortunate to beach their “canoe” and then “waited in vain” for the herd to thin out before proceeding.
George Catlin, Buffalo Herds Crossing the Upper Missouri, 1832, oil on canvas, 11 1⁄4 x 14 3⁄8 in. (28.5 x 36.6 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison, Jr., 1985.66.400
According to History Professor-author Dr. Brad Tennant of Dakota Wesleyan University, it was at Fort Clark and the adjacent Mandan village of Mih-tutta-hang-kusch where Catlin stepped up his game on sketching and painting portraits and village scenes as well as journaling in order to document the Mandan and Hidatsa cultures.[13] In Fort Clark and Its Neighbors, Raymond Wood and his co-authors, William J. Hunt and Randy H. Williams, noted how Catlin both observed and interacted directly with the Mandan people through interpreters such as James Kipp whose quarters he stayed in. Kipp was Fort Clark’s bourgeois at the time and arguably the first white man to spend considerable time — over ten years — with the Mandans and learned their language. Kipp and Catlin engaged in many conversations pertaining to the Mandans and the fur trade. Catlin observed and was first to produce a written, though poorly understood, description of the four day Mandan Okipa religious ceremony. Kipp also paved the way for Catlin to paint portraits of famous individuals such as Mato-Tope (Mandan Chief Four Bears).
Chief Four Bears by George Catlin
Consequently, over twenty percent of Catlin’s Letters and Notes,… Volume I and 2, focused on the Mandan people.[14] One example Catlin described and sketched was the Buffalo Dance which was initiated in response to food insecurity and hunger from a prolonged absence of the buffalo and the need to call/invite them back:
…the buffalo dance…is held for the purpose of making the buffalo come, of inducing
the buffalo herds to change the direction of their wanderings, and bend their course
towards the Mandan village, and graze about on the beautiful hills and bluffs in its
vicinity, where the Mandans can shoot them down…this strange operation is carried
on in the public area in the centre of the village, and in front of the great medicine or
mystery lodge. About ten or fifteen Mandans at a time join in the dance, each one with
the skin of the buffalo’s head (or mask) with. The horns on, placed over his head, and
in his hand his favorite bow or lance, with which he is used to slay the buffalo… it
never fails, for it cannot be stopped (but is going incessantly day and night) until “buffalo
come” …and lookers-on stand ready with masks on their heads, and weapons in hand,
to take the place of each one as he becomes fatigued, and jumps out of the ring …These
dances have sometimes been continued in this village two and three weeks without
stopping an instant until the joyful moment when buffaloes made their appearance.[15]
Buffalo Dance by George Catlin from
Prince Maximilian and Karl Bodmer—1833-1834
In reading many of German Prince Maximilian’s journal entries pertaining to the Upper Missouri, he saw with unveiled eyes better than anyone else when it came to obtaining descriptive detail, interpreting ethnographic information and drawing careful conclusions shorn of bias. These traits were instilled by German mentors Johann Blumenbach of early physical anthropology fame, and scientist Alexander von Humboldt, an early pioneer of ecology and environmentalism.
Born in Zurich, Switzerland, in his early twenties, Karl Bodmer came to America as a wildlife painter hired by Maximilian. While in the United States Bodmer painted about four hundred watercolors, many while on the Upper Missouri. He created more than thirty-five detailed watercolor and pencil sketches of Mih-tutta-hangkush and many of its inhabitants. As much as his portraits tend to be interesting, Bodmer’s landscape and wildlife paintings are more impressive particularly when combining herds of elk and buffalo on the Missouri River. Among his best work, Indians Hunting the Bison, captures the excitement, mistique, and danger that best epitomizes a buffalo hunt on the Northern Plains in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Indians hunting buffalo by Karl Bodmer
You can also see this painting online by searching Bodmer’s Tableau plate #31 or see it in Travels in the Interior of North America by Maximilian, Prince of Wied and Karl Bodmer.[16]
Maximilian and Bodmer resided about a year on the Upper Missouri at the American Fur Company’s trading posts—Forts Pierre, Clark, Union and McKenzie. Fort McKenzie was located a few miles west of the Marias—Missouri River confluence in northwestern Montana. They were at Fort Mckensie for five weeks in late summer/early fall. While there, Maximilian collected botanical specimens and documented his observations and interactions. Here he records a visit to a recently arrived Piegan chief whose camp was across the Missouri River from the fort, while Bodmer made arrangements to sketch a Piegan medicine man for the following day:
August 11, 1833: The river and its banks were teeming with Indians, who were
mostly enjoying themselves swimming. They ran over the barge (keelboat) lying in
the river and jumped from it into the river…one saw beautiful, slender, young people,
and their color was a very darkly shining redish brown…we went into a small hunting
tipi...The entire household —four or five men and a large number of women and
children—crowded into the doorway to see us. The first thing we did was to shake
hands with the men. Then someone handed us a wooden bowl with very fresh water,
and we drank…a wooden bowl, in which there was cooked beaver tail, when it is
cooked quite tender, does not taste bad…the beaver skins from these people were well
preserved and completely cleared of fat…the old women smoked with us before the door.
A crowd of small children were quite dark brown and very neat. All the men’s leather
suits were very clean and quite simple; since they were not dressed in their better clothes,
their hair hung down unadorned…we left and and returned to the fort…the Indians
arrived, each one with a little keg, and gave every useful thing they owned for their
favorite beverage. Many came in singing and dancing and offered their women and girls
for whiskey. Others brought horses, beaver skins and other pelts, and we witnessed
indescribable scenes. In general it must be said that these Indians, even when drunk,
behaved better than all the others along the Missouri. As soon as they had whiskey, they
went back to the camp, and the greatest part of them left today.[17]
Because of a bloody Assiniboine attack on the Piegan village outside the fort walls on August 28, 1833, Maximilian, Bodmer and a third visitor were encouraged to cut short their stay and return to Fort Union. They departed Fort Mckenzie on September 14 on a newly built Mackinaw boat with four engages to man the boat and provide fresh meat for the journey. Some of Maximilian”s journal entries:
September 14, 1833: broke with a bright, beautiful morning. Our boat was cleaned
and loaded about eleven o’clock.
(Note: From this moment things headed south for the next two days for Maximilian and his companions!)
It was too small, and we immediately saw that, with the cargo, that we could barely
sit, much less find space for sleep…The larger of my two bears had been shrieking
fiercely all night in his new crate. This crate with the two bears was placed in the
middle of the cargo, where it extended from one side to the other…We glided swiftly
down the Missouri…Our bears roared wildly through the evening…we were cold
besides and were soaked by heavy rain all night long. Our beds got wet, and we could
use them only in part.
September 15: Early in the morning we continued on. During the night so much water
had leaked into our boat that it was half full…The morning was cold, unpleasant and
windy. For several hours we bailed water out of the boat…we also noticed that our
pretty, tame, striped squirrel, which I brought along in a cage, had drowned…We took
all the crates and trunks on shore, but how horrible! Not one of all our things were dry…
what grieved me most of all was that my entire botanical collection, which I had
assembled with effort and persistence during a journey of five to six months on the
Missouri, now seemed completely lost…
September 18: Everything around us is wet. Today, as they had last evening, buffalo were
moving on both banks. To the left under the high, steep mountains of the Mauvaises-
Terres [ Badlands ] we saw bulls everywhere in small bunches…we saw whitish grey
bighorn standing near the mountains, and before us a troop of twelve elk with a big bull
trotted through the river…We sailed down through a narrow channel between two
sandbars, and the current was so strong that we quickly caught up with the animals.
Well within rifle range, they (buffalo) filed along beside us; they were apprehensive about
this, but we did not want to shoot. To the right, [ more ] buffalo were standing in a
cottonwood forest…Scarcely a quarter of an hour [ later ], a herd of at least 150 buffalo
crowded together moved into the river to drink. The view was most interesting: cows,
calves, and bulls were mingled; the latter were bellowing mightily and drove the cows.
We sat motionless, let the boat drift, and came within favorable rifle range, apparently
without their noticing us. Scarcely 60 paces farther [along], [we saw] a troop of six
cow Elk on a sandbar near a small willow island; [they were] with a powerful bull,
which emitted a bugling cry …A good bull…got wind of us and all of them, elk and
buffalo, took flight…Today, we have seen more than several thousand buffalo and many
elk and bighorn, and also antelope…but evening soon fell, and in the twilight of the tall,
dark forest, the great horned owl began its “Hoo! Hoo! Hoo!”…The moon shown brightly;
weather and river were very beautiful. Buffalo herds trotted, splashing through the river;
bull elk bugled to the right and left in the woodlands; wolves howled at various places in
a remarkable chorus; and the great horned owls heard in many places….[18,19]
Herds of buffalo and elk on the Upper Missouri by Karl Bodmer
They wintered (1833-34) under harsh conditions at Fort Clark, which did allow Maximilian time to cultivate and develop deep friendships with many of the more notable Mandan, especially Mato-Tope (Four Bears), while Bodmer continued his painting. This resulted in the gathering of a considerable amount of in depth ethnographic information, about the Mandan, Hidatsa, and to a lesser extent the Arikara as well as capturing scenes of the Mandan village of Mih-tutta-hang-kusch and of the people who lived there. Noted historians praise Maximilian in how he amassed such a depth of knowledge, insight and understanding in just six months. His ethnographic data continues to be cited as firsthand observations and his geologic and biological descriptions are also prized. Native historians on the official MHA web site state that of the early Euro-Americans who documented what they observed and learned through interpreters, “Maximilian may be recognized as the best of the various authorities.” Tragically, these same three tribes were destined to be decimated by the smallpox epidemic three years after Maximilian’s visit.
Perhaps the foremost scholar on Mandan ceremonial life and social struture was native North Dakota anthropologist and author Dr Alfred Bowers. Over the period 1929-33 and again in 1946 he immersed himself into the Mandan world and confirmed and expanded beyond Maximilian’s near flawless description and understanding of the Mandan Okipa Ceremony “the most complicate and colorful ceremony performed on the Northern Plains.” The Okipa has been mistakenly compared to other plains tribal sun dances. Bowers noted “it was a dramatization of the creation of the earth, its people, plants and animals, together with the struggles the Mandan endured to attain their present position.” [20]
John James Audubon—1843
In 1843, eleven years after Catlin’s ground breaking visit to the Upper Missouri, America’s greatest naturalist of the time, John James Audubon, fulfilled a longstanding dream to experience the Upper Missouri. Audubon achieved fame in 1826 when he published the initial series of The Birds of America, containing the first of his color-plate folios measuring a whopping 39x26 inches. By the time he was finished in 1838 his illustrations would grow to 435 birds. The Birds of America was considered, at the time, to be the greatest ornithological work and possibly still is today.
On April 25 1843 Audubon and several invited guests embarked from St. Louis on the American Fur Company steamboat Omega bound for the Upper Missouri. Audubon was age fifty-eight at the time and was experiencing early to moderate declining health. Yet, he was the rock star amongst all the visiting VIPs that visited Forts Pierre and Union in the first half of the nineteenth century. In contrast, Maximilian and Bodmer traveled under assumed names. Due to financial problems at home, Audubon’s goal was to collect, sketch and paint enough new species of birds and four-footed mammals called quadrupeds for a hope for new book co-authored with his friend and supporter John Bachman.
Bald Eagle by John James Audubon from
Audubon carried a copy of Catlin’s Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs and Condition of the North American Indians, published in 1841. Included in Catlin’s book were line engravings of most of the paintings he made on the Upper Missouri plus his immense amount of ethnograhic notes and letters. For some reason, Audubon repeatedly criticized Catlin’s artwork and writing in his Missouri River Journals—not that Catlin didn’t deserve it to a degree. They were polar opposites as to their world views. Audubon was a former slaveholder and defended slavery. Unlike Catlin, he had little interest in interacting with Native People and viewed Indians as poor, smelly, dirty and untrustworthy. He thought Catlin was naive and a Pollyanna of sorts. He also questioned Catlin’s paintings that portrayed Indians who were impressively dressed, while the Indians he met were dirty and poorly dressed. Brad Tennant suggests the eleven year difference between Catlin’s and Audubon’s visits, general observations in Native people’s dress and hygiene, probably had more to do with the interim impact of the fur trade decline as well as the devastating impact upon the Missouri River tribes and their cultures by relentless outbreaks of disease—smallpox, influenza, whooping cough, measles and cholera. Nevertheless, excuses aside, Audubon looked out from veiled eyes with regard to Native People. [21]
On Sunday, July 2, 1843, Audubon violated the burial of a Native man well known to residents of the fort and inadvertently destroyed the coffin. He had the help of Edwin Denig, thirty years old at the time, and the Chief Clerk of the post, and eager to please. Audubon’s journal entry:
Mr. Denig and I walked off with a bag and instruments, to take off the head of
a three-years-dead Indian Chief called White Cow. Mr. Denig got up on my
shoulders and into the branches near the coffin, which stood about ten feet above
ground. The coffin was lowered, or rather tumbled, down, and the cover was soon
hammered off; to my surprise, the feet were placed on the pillow, instead of the head,
which lay at the foot of the coffin—if a long box may be called. Worms innumerable
were all about it; the feet were naked, shrunk, and dried up. The head had still the
hair on, but was twisted off in a moment, under jaw and all. The body had been
first wrapped up in a Buffalo skin without hair, and then in another robe with the
hair on, as usual; after this the dead man had been enveloped in an American flag,
and over this a superb scarlet blanket. We left all on the ground but the head. Squires,
Mr. Denig and young Owen McKenzie went afterwards to try to replace the coffin
and contents on the tree, but in vain; the whole affair fell to the ground, and there it
lies; but I intend to-morrow to have it covered with earth.
This passage illustrates the indifference of most white Americans of the day. No doubt Denig would have known White Cow fairly well and it would be likely that White Cow’s family lived close by. Audubon was told the man’s name and some of his story: “He was a good friend to the whites… he was also a famous orator…He was, however, also consumptive (likely advanced tuberculosis), and finding himself about to die, he sent his squaw for water, took an arrow from his quiver, and thrusting it into his heart, expired and was found dead when his squaw returned to the lodge.” Audubon, as with most naturalists of the time, procured Native skulls for study. What does it say about Audubon given his eulogy of sorts for White Cow in his journal, or was it the scientist in him simply documenting the circumstances of White Cow’s death. [22]
Audubon, known for his descriptive nature writer, recorded the following encounter on May 26,1843 below Fort Pierre and just above the Big Bend while making his way up river on the side-wheeler Omega:
We…found the prairie so completely trodden by Buffaloes that it was next to
impossible to walk. Not withstanding this, however, a few birds were procured.
The boat continued on with much difficulty, being often stopped for want of
water. At one place we counted over a hundred dead Buffalo calves; we saw a
great number, however, that did reach the top of the bank, and proceeded to
feeding at once.[23]
According to his Missouri River journals John James Audubon hunted literally every day and was usually accompanied by three travel companions, John Graham Bell, Isaac Sprague and Edward Harris, all of whom kept good journals. Audubon resided at Fort Union for nine weeks and ten days at Fort Pierre. In total he was on the Upper Missouri for about six months. Besides the love of the hunt, he identified new bird species from birds he shot. He utilized wire mounts to bring his birds back to life through the realism of their pose. Naturalists considered his paintings remarkable for their accuracy of color. Audubon got so caught up in his hunting that he failed in his original research goals, though he did manage to obtain information on approximately three or four quadrupeds and fourteen new species of birds. Later, back home in Manhattan, New York he defended himself for the lack of scientific production by pointing out that “ I have the best accounts of the habits of the buffalo, beaver, antelopes, bighorns, etc…, that were ever written…” He could be right. [24]
Through his surviving Missouri River journals and letters, we are left with a vivid picture that allowed the reader to see what he saw. In a letter to his wife, Lucy, he wrote: “…it is impossible to describe or even conceive the vast multitudes of these animals that exist even now, and feed on these ocean-like prairies… My head is actually swimming with excitement and I cannot write anymore.” From the June 13 journal entry. [25]
In passing the Little Missouri River (located 27 miles below present day New Town, ND) on June 9,1843, three days from reaching Fort Union, the Omega and its passengers began to enter a new world equal in scope to the African Serenget. Audubon encountered wildlife scenes he had never before seen or imagined. Below ae excerpts of Audubon’s beautiful prose taken from his Missouri River Journals:
June 9, 1843: We had a very heavy white frost last night, but we have had a fine,
pleasant day on the whole, and to me a most interesting one. We passed the Little
Missouri about ten this morning…we saw three Elks swimming across it, and the
number of this fine species of Deer that are about us is almost inconceivable…
Sprague and I went up to the top of the hills bounding the beautiful prairie, by
which we had stopped to repair something about the engine. We gathered some
handsome lupines..and many other curious plants. From this elevated spot we could
see the wilderness to an immense distance; the Missouri looked as if only a brook,
and our steamer a very small one indeed.[26]
June 10, 1843: Two wolves made their appearance, Harris saw a gang of Elks,
consisting of between thirty and forty. We have passed a good number of Wild geese
with goslings; the Geese were shot at, not withstanding my remonstrances on account
of the young, but fortunately all escaped.We passed some beautiful scenery and almost
opposite had the pleasure of seeing five Mountain Rams, or Bighorns, on the summit
of a hill…we also passed the White River (White Earth River)…we saw what we
supposed to be three Grizzly Bears, but could not be sure.…I forgot to say that last
evening we saw a large herd of Buffaloes, with many calves among them…They stared,
and then started at a handsome cantor…and then passed over a slight knoll, producing
a beautiful picturesque view.[27]
June 13, 1843: We have seen an immensity of Game of all description.Yesterday and
within only three miles from this place (Fort Union) we saw 22 Mountain Rams in
one flock…Grisley Bears are abundant too, and Wolves are not to be compted, so
numerous are these beasts everywhere.[28]
The Writer’s Struggles with
Their Message:
Denig, Catlin, Maximilian and Audubon all had in common to varying degrees a desire to experience the Great Plains and to assess the impact of the fur trade on the buffalo as well as Native peoples and their cultures. Maximilian and Catlin in particular wanted to study the “vanishing Indian” before it was too late. All had their other motivations for the journey— some quite complex. Bear in mind that all four, though Maximilian is largely exempted, coped with their own struggles, contradictions and their Euro-American perspectives with varying degrees of insight and success. Maximillian was not perfect. In keeping with scientists of his time, in his journal he bemoaned that he was not able to collect an Indian skull while in America. That said, there are also many positive traits, insights and contributions we can say about all four of them.
Prince Maximilian traveled under an assumed name, Baron Braunsberg, throughout his entire time on the Upper Missouri. His enlightened writing might have inspired our young nation in ways that George Catlin never could. However, unlike Catlin, Maximilian failed to get his written accounts out to a wide distribution. His saving grace is that he hired Karl Bodmer, arguably the greatest artist to travel the Upper Missouri. Bodmer’s watercolors were first exhibited in Paris in 1836. In 1843 the English translation of the book, Travels in the Interior of North America, containing eighty-one color plate prints accompanied by selected writings from Maximilan’s journals, was published to a limited audience. Never too late, after waiting 170 years and a monumental effort across two continents, a complete, accessible, three volume edition was printed by the University of Oklahoma Press by 2016.
In 1858 Denig died at age 46 of a probable appendicitis, which cut short his work on Five Indian Tribes of the Upper Missouri. He was subsequently relegated to anonymity. What became of his manuscript? It turns out his work was buried in the writings of another man. In 1949 ethnologist John Ewers discovered and read portions of a manuscript in the Missouri Historical Society Library that he eventually confirmed as Denig’s. It had four complete chapters concerning the Sioux, Assiniboine, Cree, and Arikara. There was nearly a complete chapter on the Crows. With some additional detective work, Ewers discovered a much smaller manuscript edited by a geologist and friend of Denig’s, Ferdinand Hayden, which was published in 1862. No author was recognized for the book, but Hayden was designated as the “Editor.” Several months later Hayden was lauded for his “work” by the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. The Society published a monograph of a few pages from the book now bearing Hayden’s name as “author.” In the introduction to this work Hayden wrote a brazen lie crediting himself and others for the accumulation of the ethnographic materials and implied authorship of the resulting manuscript. He lavished praise on Alexander Culbertson, the Fort Union bourgeois who had proceeded Denig.
In 1961 Denig's ninety-nine years of stirring in the grave finally came to an end, allowing Denig to “slip away to the next room” following the published edition of Five Indian Tribes of the Upper Missouri by the University of Oklahoma Press crediting Denig as author and edited by John Ewers.[29]
What of Hayden? It appears he got a pass. He late earned a degree of fame in that he was the first scientist to collect dinosaur specimens in the 1850s and connect them to the Hell Creek Formations of present North and South Dakota and Montana. In 1853, he was the first Euro-American fossil hunter the Lakota encountered. They thought Hayden was a harmless lunatic over his obsession with fossils and gave him a wide berth. [30]
When John Audubon returned home to New York from the Upper Missouri in late 1843, pressed by financial problems, he forged ahead to gather more quadrupeds and to finish work on his book, Quadrupeds of North America. He died in 1851 at age sixty-five after three years of severe physical and cognitive decline. Quadrupeds was completed and published by family members in 1853. Audubon always intended to write the story of his life from his many journals which went back to at least 1820. However, in 1835, a warehouse fire in Manhattan destroyed a number of his journals and field notes though not the main body. In the 1860s, his widow, Lucy Audubon gathered her husband’s considerable remaining journals and in 1867 put together a hefty manuscript while editing out some “objectionable passages.” There was very little of her husband’s Missouri River journals included in the manuscript.
By the mid-1880s, John and Lucy Audubon’s granddaughter, Maria Audubon, asserted control from the family for her grandfather’s remaining letters, field notes and journals.” To her credit she hired the most accomplished American ornithologist of the time, Dr. Elliott Coues, to write and advise on the scientific material. What happened next is hard to believe. Fearing a family scandal, Maria falsified her grandfather’s journal. She was intent on remaking his persona in her own image as “a refined and cultured gentleman,”and visionary conservationist, so she sanitized her grandfathers journals through heavy editing and forgery. She planted “evidence” to support his false claim several years before in discovering what he named the Lincoln finch, a falsified new bird species.
John Audubon had even painted the phantom bird and published it. His journals were replete with racist entries and he was an unapologetic sportsman. I was astounded to read how he and his hunting friends would needlessly kill several buffalo and upwards of dozens to a hundred or more birds a day with little contemplative regret or discussion. Maria forged passages that burnished his conservationist credentials. For example, Maria also added language into his journal entry of August 5, 1843, while on a buffalo hunt that expressed his fear of extinction of the buffalo. Not true. Don’t we wish he had? He was not a conservationist.
After Maria finished the manuscript and got it published in 1897, she burned all the original materials in her possession. However, she didn’t count on the future discovery of three important portions of his missing 1843 Missouri River Journals which were discovered by Daniel Patterson, researched and published in 2016: The Missouri River Journals of John James Audubon—edited by Daniel Patterson. It took 120 years to debunk many of Maria Audubon’s deceits and to reveal John Audubon as the conflicted, complex human being he was—a man of his time— meaning his racist views and a lack of a conservationist ethic were typical of many in his time.[30]
From Daniel Patterson, a true story that exemplifies Audubon’s conflicted character:
Audubon’s good friend the Scottish naturalist William MacGillivray captured
an aspect of Audubon’s ethic in a lively account of a lovely May day of fowling near
Edinburgh in 1839. The three speakers in this sketch are Audubon, MacGillivray,
and his son. Just as MacGillivray’s son raises his gun to shoot a lapwing (ground
nesting bird) Audubon speaks up: “Don’t shoot it…It has a nest, and if you kill it
you probably destroy five birds, or prevent four birds from being hatched. I hate to
see birds shot while breeding.” The young hunter’s response was wryly incriminating:
“By any person but yourself.”
—quoted in Chalmers, John. Audubon in Edinburgh p 182
Daniel Patterson reminds us that Audubon was not just a racist and a hunter. He was also the creator of The Birds of America. He sees the John Audubon story mirroring the story “of a people that spoiled everything they loved and touched, a country that did not know how to restrain itself, perhaps a species that did not know how to rise above primal, competitive urges long enough to leave an environment healthy and productive for future generations.”[31] As a species we are still struggling or indifferent toward the same moral and ethical issues Audubon struggled with, although repackaged as a different species extinction issue— climate change.
The American Prairie Reserve—A Catlin Plains Park
Subsequent to George Catlin’s Upper Missouri experiences he wrote a visionary statement “deeply interned” into Volume 1, pages 295-297, Letters and Notes…on the North American Indians calling for the establishment of a “nation’s park” on the Great Plains out of concern of the excessive killing of the buffalo that he witnessed and a desire to preserve Native lifeways. I don’t know how hard he promoted this proposal. Over the years he took his art gallery, artifacts and sometimes Native People on the road to large crowds throughout America and Europe. His two volume book was published in 1841, just nine years after his Upper Missouri travels. By some accounts it was widely read.
"…it is here…one entire plains of grass,…that the buffaloes dwell, and hovering about them live and flourish the tribes of Indians who are joint tenants with them, whom God made for their enjoyment…And what a splendid contemplation when one who has traveled as I have through these realms, and can duly appreciate them, imagines the as they might in future be seen (by some great protecting policy of government) preserved in their pristine beauty and wildness, in a magnificent part, where the world could see for ages to come…a ‘nation’s park’…” [33]
George Catlin died a few months after Congress enacted the establishment of Yellowstone Park in 1872. Although a step in the right direction the buffalo in our parks and private owners are still fenced in, keeping them from roaming freely—a key factor in maintaining biological diversity. Dan Flores points out that the National park model successfully used throughout the twentieth century may be ripe for a transformation to a Catlin-like plains park (surrounded by a perimeter fence) in the twenty-first century. Many wildlife biologists note that in order to have a true re-wilding, a plains park should be at least 2.5 million acres. Flores notes that the present American Prairie Reserve (APR), located in northeast Montana, was established as a nonprofit in 2001 following President Clinton’s 2001 proclamation of an Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument.
The new monument encompasses 150 miles of the Missouri River and 377,346 acres that is at the heart of northern plains history. If merged one day with the adjacent 1.1 million acre Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge, combined with public lease land and private land purchases over time, the result could be a 3.2 million acre ecosystem.
It would be almost 1 1/2 times larger than Yellowstone Park and capable of sustaining at a minimum 10,000 free roaming, wild herds of buffalo, elk herds, Big Horn sheep, and potentially grizzly bears and gray wolves. Because of its nonprofit status the APR is funded largely through donations and grants and receives no federal funds. Understandably, there are issues between the APR and private land owners and cattle producers. There is also the adverse impact of local population decline. Rebuilding has its wildlife benefits and controversies.
American Prairie Reserve Map from AmericanPrairie.org
At the time of Lewis and Clark the Great Plains, and, in particular, the Upper Missouri region, were one of the ecological wonders of the world. In American Serengeti Dan Flores believes that getting some re-creation of the Great Plains Serengeti, a world that existed for ten thousand years with its wildlife diversity and prairie ecosystem, “would be a cultural goal for the United States that its citizens, and no doubt citizens of the world, would celebrate for centuries.” The APR may be our best hope depending on how it solves it controversies. However, the elephant in the room is climate change. The near-destruction of the buffalo due to divisions, denial, greed, indifference, and fatalism mirrors our own ethical challenges and moral responsibility as we struggle with our personal Americas and the world’s slow response to climate change. If unchecked, rising temperatures are certain to cause untold harm to the human population as well as a tremendous loss of world species. We stand on a much worse crossroads in comparison to those who observed the decline of the buffalo in the mid- to late 19th Century and did nothing.
Cultural Imperialism:
For thousands of years the fate of the buffalo and Native people were tied together in a symbiotic relationship that worked. Western civilization came to the Great Plains to the detriment of the plains Native people and the buffalo. How did this happen? The answer is complex. The article outlines some of the “hows,” though in a time compartmentalized manner. For non-native people, understanding the “hows” can provide better insight into the “whys.” Native people are more clear about about the how and the why issues. I think about Gandhi’s alleged response to a reporter as he disembarked from his ship in Southhampton in 1931 to attend a roundtable conference in London on the future of India: “Mr. Gandhi, what do you think of Western civilization?” for which he replied, “I think it is a good idea.” As far as I know there is no evidence that Gandhi ever said that, nevertheless I see this story as a tragic metaphor for the history of Native peoples and the buffalo for the last two-hundred fifty years on the Upper Missouri. Of course, there were many Native leaders decrying the “civilized” Euro-Americans—Hidatsa Chief Le Borgne (One Eye), and Mandan Chief Four Bears of Mih-Tutta-Hangkusch are two examples.
White Cow’s grave violation by Denig and Audubon also speaks though from the grave. Since the passage of the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990, according to a Dec 26, 2023 Pro Publica article, ‘The Remains of Thousands of Native Americans Were Returned to Tribes this year,’ reported that, despite progress this year, about 180 museums that had previously reported holding ancestral remains anywhere from a single individual to as many as a couple thousand have not begun repatriating at all—34 years after NAGPRA was passed by Congress and signed into law. As of the end of 2023, there are about 97,000 Native American human remains yet to be returned from museums, US Interior Department and other federal agencies and universities. The University of North Dakota might yet be one of them. The good news is that an estimated 18,800 remains were returned to tribal nations in 2023.
Many archaeologists and museum collectors and, I suspect an even greater number of private collectors, in past years have looted Native American remains, sacred objects and funerary belongings from ancient homes, graves and places of worship. Author and naturalist Craig Childs’ 2010 book, Finders Keepers: A Tale of Archaeological Plunder and Obsession, is an excellent read on this topic. Childs recounted a conversation with a frustrated niece defending her uncle who was arrested for digging into several graves on federal land looking for painted jars and bowls presumably to collect or sell. The graves were hundreds of years old. She asked Childs if he realized what the arrest does to people like her uncle while emphasizing that they are good, simple people. Childs asked her why good people are digging graves. She replied her uncle should have stayed off federal land.
A Time Continuum of Trauma
The MHA Nation (Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara), located on the Fort Berthold Reservation in northwestern North Dakota, is a good example on the “hows” of the Plains Native Peoples’ demise beginning from the devastating smallpox outbreaks in 1781, 1792 and 1837. After a brief discussion of the 1837 smallpox outbreak I will progress through a time continuum of selective, non-comprehensive tribal trauma up to the present time using the MHA website history section plus other sources as to some of the “hows.”
1. The 1837 epidemic, over its three to four month course, decimated the population of the
three MHA tribes. In 1833 Maximilian had estimated the total Mandan population to be
2100-2200. Due to the Norway rat-related destruction of MHA corn stores and sales of
corn to feed the Euro-American traders coupled with a shortage of buffalo meat over the
winter of 1836-37 provisions were depleted to the point of famine on the eve of the
epidemic. The epidemic began in June/July, reducing the Mandans were reduced to 23 men,
40 women, and 60 to 70 young people. Family units were fractured and the homogenous
societies were forced to escape a potential second smallpox outbreak making them vulnerable
to attacks by the Sioux. In the process their large trading system as middlemen was destroyed
as new cropland had to be developed forcing them to evolve for survival.[34]
2. Because of the the scarcity of the buffalo and frequent Sioux raids the Mandan and Hidatsa
moved for security reasons in 1845 to establish Like-a-Fishhook village near newly built Fort
Berthold. They were joined by the Sahnish in 1862. The farm ground wasn’t as fertile as
their former bottomlands and the 1860s were plagued by drought insuring that food
insecurity and near-starvation were a constant threat.
3. By the 1880s reservation land steals by the US government were ongoing from successive
allotment acts designed to put an end to Indian tribal rights to reservation land and make
them individual land owners. This made it easier for White people to purchase Indian lands.
From the Native perspective, the goal of allotment was to replace tribal culture with the
white man’s culture. Consequently, in 1886 the MHA tribes signed away 1,600,000 acres of
Fort Berthold land and the reservation was opened to white settlement. By 1891, through
successive executive orders, epidemics, Indian Agents, and allotments the MHA tribes were
stripped of their property and disorganized as a group. Expected to assume a philosophy of
individualism, they were, as individuals, pushed to lower and lower social and economic
levels.
4. Native peoples are still coming to grips with the severe personal, family and community
trauma inflicted on them by forced federal boarding schools. Native People as well as
informed non-natives believe the enforced policies of the religious and government boarding
schools were a human and cultural genocide as evidenced by a comprehensive Interior
Department study released in May 2022 which noted that at least 500 Indigenous children
died while attending Indian boarding schools run or supported by the US government. 406
boarding schools and fifty gravesites were identified with additional gravesites likely. Students
endured “rampant physical, sexual and emotional abuse.” Most experienced inadequate
medical care and neglect. These specific traumas resulted in potentially lifelong mental health
and addiction disorders and other chronic health diseases in survivors and put succeeding
generations of families at risk for similar issues.
Since the May 2022 report the lack of subsequent progress toward full disclosures and
eventual reconciliation reflects indifference and possible coverups. This has been an evolving
slow process which appears to be in the early states of reconciliation. Interior Secretary Deb
Haaland initiated a year long investigation in 2021 by the Interior Department and
stayed actively engaged throughout the process. A Senate bill to establish a Truth and Healing
Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act was filed by Senator Elizabeth Warren
on 09/30/2021. Following a single hearing on the bill on 06/22/2022, the Bill was re-
introduced on 5/18/2023, in the Senate and a hearing was held on 6/7/2023.
5. As a result of Garrison Dam the flooding of the Missouri River bottom-Lands was yet
another assault on the autonomy and cultures of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Sahnish. Over
25% of the total reservation land base,152,360 acres, and 94% of their agricultural lands
were inundated almost totally destroying the tribes’ bottomland agricultural way of life. The
Army Corps of Engineers, without authorization from Congress, altered the project’s
specifications in order to protect the city of Williston, North Dakota, but nothing was done
to protect Indian communities or cultural sites such as Grandmother’s Lodge.
6. Missing and murdered indigenous women: Across the United States and Canada Native
women and girls are being taken or murdered at an alarming rate. For Native Americans,
this adds one more layer of trauma upon existing wounds. In 2020, there were 5,295 reports
of missing American Indian and Alaska Native women and girls according to the National
Crime Information Center. The CDC’s most recent report as of June I, 2023, murder is the
sixth leading cause of death for indigenous women and girls in the United States between
the ages of 1 and 44. Additionally, as of this past April 20, 2023, there is no national
database where tribes can report such crimes and no means for families or tribal investigators
to see information. According to researchers for the Indian Affairs Office of the Department
of the Interior have found that women are often misclassified as Hispanic or Asian or other
racial categories on missing-person forms and that thousands have been left off a federal
missing persons.
In early October 2023 while briefly visiting the Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College, I received a
spontaneous invitation to a well attended presentation at the MHA Interpretive Center
featuring survivor testimonials from forced Indian federal boarding schools. One woman
who spoke noted she survived her traumatic experiences through discovering strengths she
didn’t know she had. I also learned about the many crisis and outreach programs in the area
for youths and adults that prioritize “person first” language that prioritizes the identity of
individuals as human beings with unique experiences and identities over their mental health.
Henry David Thoreau once said, “It is not what you look at that matters, it is what you see.”
Many trauma survivors with strengths they discovered in the midst or in the aftermath of
their pain eventually become wounded healers in some way or another in time and place.
Personal Thoughts on Traumatic Events in Our Lives
We all experience personal trauma of various degrees through loss and the tragedies of life. Psychologist Robert Wicks notes “each of us has a range of resilience, the ability to meet, learn from and not be crushed by the challenges and stresses of life…Of even more import than the different resiliency ranges people have, is their conscious decision to maximize the ways in which they can become as hard as possible. They may not call this resilience, but it is their ability to be open to life’s experiences and so to learn.[35] For those of us who are stuck, an understanding about who we are and what we do and seeing connections to things that happened to us, could be the first step toward healing. Transformation to community resilience always begins with the personal and from there to the practice of resilience within the community. With a perseverance trauma cycles can be diminished and one day hopefully broken.
Endnotes:
1. Denig, Edwin, Five Indian Tribes of the Upper Missouri: Sioux, Arikaras, Assiniboines, Crees, Crows. Edited by John Ewers.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961, p 10
2. Denig, Five Indian Tribes, p 25
3. Isenberg, Andrew C., The Destruction of the Buffalo: An Environmental History, 1750-1920, Cambridge University Press,
2000. pp 13-30
The entire chapter, The Grassland Environment, is excellently written and a must read. The estimated North Dakota
buffalo population at the time of the Lewis and Clark Expedition is my educated guess based on the information in this
chapter and North Dakota’s traditional grass distribution: short grass prairie south and west of the Missouri River; mixed
grass prairie north and east of the Missouri encompassing the Coteau du Missouri (aka Missouri Coteau); transitional
mixed grass / tall grass prairie east of the Coteau to the Red River Valley; and tall grass prairie within the Red River Valley.
At the present time, mixed grass prairie dominated by blue grama and buffalo grass grow on our pastures along the west side
of the White Earth Valley in Mountrail County about fourteen miles above the White Earth-Missouri River confluence.
4. Flores, Dan. American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2016, pp
124-129. Flores’ source for Reid Bryson’s research is from: “Chinook Climates and Plains Peoples.” Great Plains Quarterly
(Winter 1982): pp 12-13
5. Handy-Marchello, Barbara, and Fern E. Swenson, Traces: Early Peoples of North Dakota, Bismarck: State Historical Society
of North Dakota, 2018, pp 94-96
6. Denig, Five Indian Tribes, pp 144-49
7. Casler, Michael M., and W. Raymond Wood, eds, Fort Union and Fort William: Letter Book and Journal, 1833-1835.
Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2020, pp viii-ix
8. Denig, Five Indian Tribes, pp xiii-xxxiii
9. Denig, Edwin Thompson, edit J.N.B. Hewitt, Indian Tribes of the Upper Missouri: Extract from the Forty-sixth Annual
Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology. Washington: United States Government Printing Office: 1930 pp 414-418,
500-503
10. Long, James Larpenteur (First Boy). The Assiniboines: From the Accounts of the Old Ones Told to First Boy (James Larpenteur
Long). ill. William Standing. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961 pp 63, 72
11. Watson, Bruce. “George Catlin’s Obsession”, Smithsonian Magazine, December, 2002
12. Catlin, George, The Letters and Notes on the Manners Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians, 2 Vols,
Edinburgh: John Grant 31 George IV. Bridge, 1926, Volume II: p 15
13. Tennant, Brad, “Catlin and Audubon - Impressions of the Fur Trade Frontier,” Heritage of the Great Plains; v.45, no.2
(Winter 2013) p 12
14. Wood, Raymond W, William J. Hunt, Jr., Randy H. Williams, Fort Clark and Its Indian Neighbors: A Trading Post on the
Upper Missouri, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011, pp 142-147, 179-82
15. Catlin, Letters and Notes Vol 1, pp 143-44, 163—67. Catlin’s notes on the Okipa Ceremony can also be found in Vol 1: pp
175-208
16. Wied, Maximilian, Prince of; Karl Bodmer, Travels in the Interior of North America, editorial coordination and layout by Ute
Kieseyer, Cologne ; design and layout by Claudia Frey, Cologne ; English translation by Malcolm Green, Heidelberg (Essay
by Sonja Schierle); Frances Wharton, Cologne (Editing and translation of the quotes from Maximilian Prince of Wied);
Production by Thomas Grell, Cologne. Cologne: Taschen 2001. “Indians Hunting the Bison” Tableau Plate 31, pp
132-133
17. Wied, Maximilian, Prinz von, The North American Journals of Prince Maximilian of Wied: Volume II April-September 1833,
edited by Stephen S. Witte and Marsha V. Gallagher ; translated by William J. Orr, and Dieter Karch ; foreword by John
Wilson ; introduction by Paul Schach. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press 2010. pp 366-368
18. Wied, Maximilian, Prinz von, The North American journals of Prince Maximilian of Wied…pp 449-451, 453-456. Please
note that in Maximilian’s journal entry for September 18, 1833, Maximilian could be describing the scene in Tableau 47,
based on one Bodmer’s most impressive western landscapes, “Herds of Bison and Elks on the Upper Missouri”
19. Wied, Maximilian, Prince of; Karl Bodmer, Travels in the Interior of North America, “Herds of Bison and Elks on the Upper
Missouri” Tableau Plate 47, pp 186-187
20. Bowers, Alfred W., Mandan Social and Ceremonial Organization, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 37
1950, pp 111-163; 335-336. For readers wanting to know more about the Okipa Ceremony Bowers gives a thorough
description. Elizabeth Fenn gives a more succinct description of the Okipa in Encouters At The Heart of the World, pp
121-130, 124-129
21. Tennant, Brad, “Catlin and Audubon” pp 15-18
22. Audubon, John J, The Missouri River Journals of John James Audubon, edit. Daniel Patterson, pp 85-88
23. Audubon, John J, Audubon and His Journals: Missouri River Journals, Edit. Maria R Audubon, Elliot Cous
24. Audubon, John J, The Missouri River Journals of John James Audubon, edit. Daniel Patterson, pp 302-03
25. Flores, Dan. Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc
2022, p 215
26. Audubon, John J, Audubon and His Journals: Missouri River Journals, Edit. Maria R Audubon, Elliot Cous
27. Audubon, John J, Audubon and His Journals: Missouri River Journals, Edit. Maria R Audubon, Elliot Cous
28. Audubon, John J, Audubon and Audubon, John J, The Missouri River Journals of John James Audubon, edit. Daniel
Patterson, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016. pp 79-81
29. Denig, Five Indian Tribes, pp xxxiv-xxxvii
30. Mayor, Adirenne, Fossil Legends of the First Americans, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540, pp 249-250, 260
31. Audubon, John J, The Missouri River Journals of John James Audubon, edit. Daniel Patterson, pp 1-27, 264-265, 300-04
32. Audubon, John J, The Missouri River Journals of John James Audubon, edit. Daniel Patterson, p 301
33. Catlin, Letters and Notes Vol 1, pp 295-97
34. Isenberg, Andrew C., The Destruction of the Buffalo: An. Environmental History, 1750-1920. pp 115-121
35. Wicks, Robert J., Bounce: Living the Resilient Life, 2nd ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 2023, p 5
On a hill slope located in western Adams County, North Dakota lies the evidence of a portion of the incredible Great Plains wildlife that greeted early peoples that roamed through here over thirteen thousand years ago.
