During his stay among the Mandans he had been able to lay down the Missouri according to courses and distances taken on his passage up it, corrected by frequent observations of longitude and latitude, and to add to the actual survey of this portion of the river a general map of the country between the Mississippi and Pacific from the thirty-fourth to the fifty-fourth degree of latitude.

He told me the following story of the affair: The Sioux, Chippewas, Assinaboines, Crees, and Mandans, called by him in general Miggaudiwag, which means fighters, were at variance.

A letter of this date, from Fort Union, on the Missouri, published in the St. Louis Bulletin, gives a frightful account of the ravages of the small-pox among the Mandans, Aurickerees, Minitares and Gros Venters, of the Missouri.

This disease, which first broke out about the 15th of July, among the Mandans, carried off about fifteen hundred of that tribe.

Adair's Red Shoes, Murray's old man, Catlin's noble Mandan chief, Henry's Wa-wa-tam, with what we know of Philip, Pontiac, Tecumseh and Red Jacket, would suffice to give the ages a glimpse at what was great in Indian life and Indian character.

This disease appears to have travelled up the Missouri River; and in the early years, between 1840 and 1850, it swept away hosts of Mandans, Rees, Sioux, Crows, and other tribes camped along the great river.

Summer night, dreamy with caress of softest south wind, musical with the drone of myriad crickets, with the boom of frogs from the low land adjoining the river, melancholy with the call of the catbird, with the infrequent note of the whip-poor-will, was upon the land of the Mandans when the score and one, their dripping ponies once more dry, took up the last relay of their journey.

SEE Wylie, I. A. R. <pb id='226.png' n='1961h2/A/1857' /> COWPER, FREDERICK A. G. Los muertos mandan.

Mr. Catlin believes the Mandans to have been descended from the followers of Prince Madoc, from the strong evidence which he considers his stay among them afforded him, and detailed in his work on the Indians.

I regret to add, that the Mandans have been exterminated by the small-pox and the weapons of their enemies.

But even this separation is not necessary, as we see from Catlin, who relates (I., 119) that among the Mandans it is common to see six or eight wives of a chief or medicine man "living under one roof, and all apparently quiet and contented.

Commenting on the Mandans, for instance, Maximilian Prinz zu Wied declares (II., 127) that "coyness is not a virtue of the Indian women; they often have two or three lovers at a time."

Among the Mandans, we read in Catlin (I., 95), "in mourning, like the Crows and most other tribes, the women are obliged to crop their hair all off; and the usual term of that condolence is until the hair has grown again to its former length."

If the widows of Mandans, Arawaks, Patagonians, etc., do not marry until a year after the death of their husband this is not on account of affectionate grief, but, as we have seen, because they are not allowed to.

" Even the Mandans, so highly lauded by Catlin, sometimes brutally dispose of girls at the age of eleven, as do other tribes (Comanches, etc.).

" Turning to the great Dakota or Sioux stock, we run against one of the most naïve of the sentimentalists, Catlin, who perpetrated several books on the Indians and made many "fearless" assertions about the red men in general and the Mandans in particular.

Even among the Mandans, so superior to the other Indians he visited, he found that the women, however attractive or hungry they might be, "are not allowed to sit in the same group with the men while at their meals.

Of the Mandans, Catlin says (I., 119) that wives "are mostly treated for with the father, as in all instances they are regularly bought and sold."

Malavika and Agnimitra. Mandans: Women not jealous; Not coy; Obliged to mourn; Apparent modesty; Lower than brutes; "Conjugal love,"; Brides sold.

I have seen and taken part in many matches between frontiersmen and the Sioux, Cheyennes, Grosventres, and Mandans, and the Indians were beaten in almost every one.

The creole traders of these villages, and an occasional venturous American, had gone up the Mississippi to the country of the Sioux and the Mandans, where they had trapped and hunted and traded for furs with the Indians.

And if a chieftain was to be buried, either in the river, or, as among the Mandans, on a rough platform erected on poles high up from the ground, the warriors danced before his wigwam, and assigned to a few of their number the duty of seeing that his widow and children, if he left any, should never be without food and shelter.

And, Now, We Mandans Indian We are maken houses this River south sides and We are farmes And we have Great fieldsand

We are a Friends to the White, and We hear much talk of you and we are good Indians Mandans.

There are persons who hold that the descendants of his followers built the mounds in the Mississippi Valley, and that some of them became the white Mandans of the upper Missouri, and that others founded this old Mexican civilization.