The Knife River People

For centuries the Upper Missouri River Valley was a lifeline winding through a harsh land, drawing Northern Plains Indians to its wooded banks and rich soil. Earthlodge people, like the nomadic tribes, hunted bison and other game but were essentially a farming people living in villages along the Missouri and its tributaries. At the time of their contact with Europeans, these communities were the culmination of 700 years of settlement in the area. Traditional oral histories link the ancestors of the Mandan and Hidatsa tribes living on the Knife River with tribal groups east of the Missouri River. Migrating for several hundred years along waterways, they eventually settled along the Upper Missouri. One Mandan story tells of the group's creation along the river. Coming into conflict with other tribes, the Mandans moved northward to the Heart River and adopted an architecture characterized by round earthlodges.

The Hidatsas were originally divided into three distinct sub-tribes. The Awatixa were created on the Missouri River, according to their traditions. Awaxawi and Hidatsa-Proper stories place them along streams to the east. The Hidatsas moved farther north to the mouth of the Knife, settling Awatixa Xi'e Village (Lower Hidatsa Site) around 1525 and Hidatsa Village (Big Hidatsa Site) around 1600. They were never as sedentary as the Mandans, but did borrow from them, learning corn horticulture and adopting some of their pottery patterns. Intermarriage and trade helped cement relations, and eventually the two cultures became almost indistinguishable. With the Arikaras to the south, they formed an economic force that dominated the region.

After contact with Europeans in the early 18th century, the villages began to draw a growing number of traders. Tragically, the prosperity that followed was accompanied by an enemy the Indians could not fight: European disease. When smallpox ravaged the tribes in 1781, the Mandans fled upriver, nearer Hidatsa Village. The people from Awatixa Xi'e abandoned their village, returning to the area in 1796 to build Awatixa Village (Sakakawea Site). The weakened tribes were now easier targets for Sioux raiders, who burned Awatixa village in 1834. After another epidemic in 1837 almost destroyed the Mandans, the villages broke up. Their movements for the next few years are obscure. In 1845, the Mandans and Hidatsas founded Like-A-Fishhook village upriver, where they were joined in 1862 by the Arikaras. The tribes were forced in 1885 to abandon their village and make their final move onto the Fort Berthold Reservation. Today the tribes, now called the Three Affiliated Tribes, continue to practice their traditional ways.

Village Life
The Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara tribes shared a culture superbly adapted to the conditions of the upper Missouri valley. Their summer villages, located on natural terraces above the river, were ordered communities as large as 120 lodges. These spacious structures sheltered families of 10 to 30 people from the region's extreme temperatures. The villages were strategically located for defense, often on a narrow bluff with water on two sides and a palisade on the third. In winter the inhabitants moved into smaller lodges along the bottom lands, where trees provided firewood and protection from the cold wind.

In this society, men lived in the household of their wives, bringing only their clothes, horses, and weapons. Women built, owned, and maintained the lodges and owned the gardens, gardening tools, food, dogs, and colts. Related lodge families made up clans, whose members were forbidden to marry inside the group. Cutting across village boundaries, a clan expected its members to help and guide each other. Clans were competitive, especially regarding success in war, but it was the age-grade societies, transcending village and clan, that were looked to for personal prestige. Young men purchased membership in the lowest society at 12 or 13, progressing to higher and more expensive levels as they reached the proper age. Besides serving as warrior bands, each group was responsible for a social function: policing the village, scouting, or planning the hunt. Most importantly, the societies were a means of social control, setting standards of behavior and transmitting tribal lore and custom.

The roles of the sexes were strictly defined. Men spent their time seeking spiritual knowledge or hunting and horse raiding, difficult and dangerous but relatively infrequent undertakings. Women performed virtually all of the regular work: gardening, preparing food, maintaining the lodges, and, until the tribes obtained horses, carrying burdens. The lives of these people were not totally devoted to subsistence, however. They made time for play, such as the hoop and spear game shown at right. Honored storytellers passed on oral traditions and moral lessons, focusing on traditional tribal values of respect, humility, and strength. The open area in the center of each Mandan village was often given over to dancing and ritual, which bonded the members of the tribe and reaffirmed their place in the world.

The Village Economy
Agriculture was the economic foundation of the Knife River people, who harvested much of their food from rich floodplain gardens. The land was controlled by women-the size of a family's plot was determined by the number of women who could work it-and passed through the female line. They raised squash, pumpkin, beans, sunflowers, and, most importantly, tough, quick-maturing varieties of corn that thrived in the meager rainfall and short growing season. Summer's first corn was celebrated in the Green Corn ceremony. Berries, roots, and fish supplemented their diet. Upland hunting provided buffalo meat, hides, bones, and sinew.

These proficient farmers traded their surplus produce to nomadic tribes for buffalo hides, deer skins, dried meat, and other items in short supply. At the junction of major trade routes, they became middlemen, dealing in goods from a vast network: obsidian from Wyoming, copper from the Great Lakes, shells from the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Northwest, and, after the 17th century, guns, horses, and metal items. High quality flint quarried locally found its way to tribes over a large part of the continent through this trade system.


The Battle and the Hunt
In this warrior culture, raiding and hunting were the chief occupations of the men. When conflict was imminent, a war chief assumed leadership of the village. Tangible results--horses and loot--often came from the raids, which were really stages on which warrior's could prove themselves. Hunting parties were planned in much the same fashion, with a respected hunter choosing participants and planning the event, prowess in battle and hunt led to status in the village, both individually and for the societies and clans. Ambitious young men would risk leading a party-highly rewarding if successful, ruinous to a reputation if not. The primary weapon was the bow and arrow, along with clubs, tomahawks, lances, shields, and knives. Even more prestigious than wounding or killing an enemy was "counting coup"--touching him in battle. But ambition did not spur every action: The warriors often had to defend the village against raids by other tribes. When the men prevailed in battle or hunt, the women would celebrate with dance and song throughout the village.

Spirit and Ritual
Spirits guided the events of the material world, and from an early age, tribal members (usually male) sought their help. Fasting in a sacred place, a boy hoped to be visited by a spirit, often in animal form, who would give him "power" and guide him through life. The nature of the vision that he reported to his elders determined his role within the tribe, If directed by his vision, he would as a young man make a greater sacrifice to the spirits, spilling his blood in the Okipa ceremony. The Okipa was the most important of a number of ceremonies performed by Mandan clans and age-grade societies to ensure good crops, successful hunts, and victory in battle. Ceremonies could be conducted only by those with "medicine," which was obtained by purchasing from a fellow clan or society member one of the bundles of sacred objects associated with tribal mythology. With bundle ownership came responsibility for knowledge of the songs, stories, prayers, and rituals necessary for spiritual communication. Certain bundle owners were looked upon as respected leaders of the tribe.

Reading the Past
The story of Knife River is still being written. Long-held theories have been revised by recent archeological research. From 1976 to 1983, Dr. Stanley Ahler of the University of North Dakota directed excavations in the park. Piecing together the story from the remains of earthlodges, 150,000 pottery shards, and 8,400 stone tools, Dr. Ahler now believes that the Hidatsa arrived in the area earlier (around 1300) than had been thought, Evidence from some 50 sites constitutes an unbroken record of 500 years of human inhabitation. Even this period represents a fraction of the time that humans have lived here. Research at Knife River and nearby sites documents 11,000 years of human activity. The earliest known people in the region during the Paleo-Indian period (10,600-6000 BC) were nomads who hunted now-extinct large game. Archaic (6,000 BC - AD1) people, also nomadic, lived by hunting and gathering. The earliest artifacts found at Knife River date from this period. Signs of semi-sedentary living and rudimentary agriculture occur in the Woodland period (1000 BC-AD 1000). Permanent earthlodge villages and a horticultural economy characterize the Plains Village Period (AD 1000-1885), of which the Knife River sites represent the final and most sophisticated phase.

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