Encounters at the Heart of the World by Elizabeth A. Fenn

Author:Elizabeth A. Fenn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

MIH-TUTTA-HANG-KUSCH, JULY 30, 1825

Two years after Leavenworth’s troops had put the Arikaras to flight, another imposing force made its way up the Missouri. This huge flotilla—nine keelboats with hand-powered paddle wheels—was unlike anything the Mandans had seen before. Aboard were 476 soldiers and two peace commissioners: General Atkinson and Agent O’Fallon. The villagers regularly hosted Indian groups larger than this, but never U.S. troops in such numbers. Since the soldiers spent three days with the Arikaras before heading upstream in late July, the Mandans at Mih-tutta-hang-kusch had ample time to prepare for their arrival.49

The commissioners and their forces clearly intended to awe the Indians with their numbers, uniforms, weapons, and strength. But the express purpose of their visit was to negotiate a treaty of peace, trade, and friendship.50 The Mandans may have wondered what the fuss was about. Why the soldiers? Why a treaty? With a single exception, they had lived in peace and friendship with the United States ever since hosting the Corps of Discovery two decades earlier.

A conference on July 30, 1825, included both chiefs and warriors. Among the Mih-tutta-hang-kusch representatives were Four Bears, whose star was ascendant, and Little Crow, now an old man. Attendees from the Ruptare Mandan town upstream included Crouching Prairie Wolf, Five Beavers, Fat of the Paunch, and three others. Few if any of these men had the life experience of Little Crow, already a chief at the time of Lewis and Clark, but plenty of the Indians would have recalled the 1804–1805 winter with the Corps of Discovery, even if some, like Four Bears, had been small boys at the time.51

The surviving record tells us little of the negotiations, nor do the resulting treaty’s terms indicate what the Mandan perspective on it might have been.52 But the intent of the United States is clear: The treaty was not about land but about submission. Conflict with the Blackfeet and Arikaras combined with continued tensions with the British in Oregon to heighten the federal government’s interest in the upper-Missouri tribes, whose territory was the staging ground for forays farther west. The United States wanted a guarantee of loyalty from them.

So the treaty, parroting what the commissioners said in their meetings, first chastened and then forgave the Mandans for their recent “acts of hostility” (that single, aberrant incident), and said that henceforth “a firm and lasting peace … and a friendly intercourse” were to prevail. The Mandans in turn were to acknowledge the “supremacy” and “protection” of the United States.53 Since Lewis and Clark had proclaimed this very same thing, the Mandans may not have appreciated its implications here.

U.S. sovereignty began, as the commissioners saw it, with matters of justice. The treaty imposed federal law in all instances of conflict between Mandans and U.S. citizens. The chiefs agreed to turn over “stolen” property as well as any Indians whom U.S. nationals accused of crimes; defendants in such cases would face trial in U.S. courts and punishments meted out by the same. There was no turnabout parity in this regard.

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