Coyote Warrior

by Paul Van Develder

  When the state finally got around to paving Old Number Eight in the late 1960s, Main Street in Parshall boasted a bank and a movie house, a bowling alley and grocery store, three churches, eight grain silos at the south end of town, a high school with a track and a football field at the north end, an airport with half a dozen tie-downs, a Ford dealer, a kidney-shaped public swimming pool with a diving board and a wading pool for toddlers, and a nine-hole golf course. The shared values that rooted its two thousand residents to the earth had survived the journey from the old country. Foremost among these were discipline, sacrifice, and an unswerving fidelity to God, neighbor, and country. Payment for life’s sundry necessities, from quilting needles to canning jars and John Deere’s eight-bottom plow, were made with the cash from the cookie jar. There was no greater sin than going to meet your Maker with a basket of unpaid bills.

  Like their newly arrived neighbors from northern Europe, the citizens of Elbowoods cultivated the same fields and lived in the same villages for hundreds of years. They built things with a view to posterity. The Mandan in particular were famed throughout the pre-Columbian Americas as masters of horticulture and trade. At the peak of their material wealth, perhaps early in the eighteenth century, the cluster of nine Mandan Villages at the mouth of the Heart River, in what today is central North Dakota, was home to more than fourteen thousand people. Two centuries before the first French voyageurs established commercial ties with the tribes, the Heart River Villages were the commercial hub of a trade and distribution network that linked the Aztec and Toltec cultures of Mesoamerica to the Cree of northern Quebec. Comanche of the Southwest brought Arab stallions and Spanish knives to trade with Hudson Bay Assiniboin, who bartered English flintlocks, gunpowder, and textiles. By the early seventeenth century, French explorers on the Gulf Coast were well aware of the great trading bazaar at the Heart River from stories they heard while mapping the Lower Mississippi. At about the time Benjamin Franklin was born in the small seaside village of Boston, the Spanish horse culture was meeting the English gun culture three miles west of a hilltop where Norwegian immigrants would build the North Dakota state capitol in Bismarck two hundred years later.

  When the French explorer Sieur de La Vérendrye finally made his way to the Mandan Villages in November of 1738, he was heartened to discover that the Mandan’s reputation as skilled diplomats was well deserved. This, combined with reports from the Assiniboin that the Mandan had blue eyes and fair hair, bolstered the legend that the Mandan people were not Indians at all. Their hair and eyes suggested that they were the long-lost descendants of the famous Welshman Prince Modoc, the beloved eleventh-century ruler who sailed over the western horizon with two boatloads of loyal subjects, never to be heard from again. After meeting the Mandan, La Vérendrye was skeptical about the legend but was nevertheless impressed when he found the Mandan trading goods manufactured in England, France, and Spain. Upon his return to Montreal, La Vérendrye reported to his Paris benefactors that the Mandan leaders promoted their people’s well-being through diplomacy and trade, rather than the familiar tactics of war and conquest. In his opinion, establishing a commercial partnership with these Indians would be required of any European monarch hopeful of exploiting the untapped wealth of the western lands.

  Two generations later, Thomas Jefferson drew the same conclusion. Nearly seventy years after La Vérendrye’s visit to the Mandan Villages at the Heart River, the grandparents of Elbowoods’ first citizens would greet two young American captains, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, when they stepped ashore from their pirogue at the mouth of the Knife River. While tribal societies on the Missouri River were well acquainted with European traders, this would be the Mandan’s first encounter with the Americans. The timing of their arrival could not have been more fortuitous. Winter would come early that year. Within weeks the High Plains were covered with snow. By late November, Captain Clark complained in his daily log that his thermometer had stopped working at forty-five below zero. Arctic conditions would linger over the Great Plains for the next five months.

  The people of the Mandan and Hidatsa tribes that Lewis and Clark encountered at the Knife River Villages had lived in close proximity to one another for hundreds of years. Generations of intermarriage and shared customs had formed a highly complex matrilineal society of clan-based, semisedentary farmers, hunters, and gatherers. Unlike their nomadic cousins, the Sioux and Assiniboin, these agrarian societies built semipermanent villages of domed-shaped earth lodges inside palisaded walls and protective moats. A single village was commonly home to a thousand or more inhabitants. Between forty and fifty feet in diameter, each earth lodge housed as many as twenty-five family members, though the average was closer to fifteen. Each family had its own hunters and warriors, and the women of the clan were the owners of both the lodge and the family gardens. Apart from the clan’s ceremonial medicine bundles, these dwellings were a clan’s principal material asset, and were passed from mother to daughter.

  After the women, children, and elders had finished the harvest, crops were dried and stored in cache pits, or underground larders that were usually accessible from inside the lodge. Typically, these bottle-shaped pits were ten feet deep and four feet wide. At the onset of winter, they would be filled to the top with dried corn, squash, beans, wild turnips, and dried berries harvested from the plentiful bushes and trees that grew along the river and low-lying hills. Cache pits held enough food to last the tribe through two poor harvests. To the good fortune of the Americans, it was these surplus stores that kept the fifty members of the Corps of Discovery from starvation through the lean winter months of 1805.

  Asking for little in return, the Mandan and Hidatsa people shared with the American explorers their lodges and hearths, their winter feasts, and the sexual hospitality of their wives and daughters. Sexual favors could be traded as freely as food for hard-to-obtain European trade goods such as ironware, textiles, and prized glass beads, but at the same time sexual relations with newly arrived strangers were an integral element of native hospitality. A woman’s sexuality was regarded as the surest method for transferring mystical powers from one male to another, from an accomplished warrior of great valor to a young husband striving to win the esteem of his elders on the field of battle, or in the hunt.

  Leading historians of colonial-era exploration Harry Fritz and James Rhonda agree that the Village Indians played the decisive role in the eventual success of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Had Jefferson’s emissaries been turned back by the hostile Teton, or had they been trapped by winter near the Yellowstone, they would likely have perished from cold and starvation that first winter. As they passed the long winter nights camped in their makeshift fort near the bend in the river that the Indians called Elbowoods, the Mandan and Hidatsa leaders prepared them for the obstacles they would encounter on their journey west. It was here, too, that the captains secured the services of a guide and translator to accompany them from the Knife to the “shining mountains” of the Rockies. She was a congenial fourteen-year-old girl named Bird Woman who lived with her sister and their French husband among the powerful Prairie Chicken clan in the largest of the three Hidatsa villages. Captured as a nine-year-old girl in a battle with the Shoshones, Bird Woman was adopted into the Hidatsa tribe by a young warrior named Cherry Necklace. The captains knew her by her Indian name, which they transcribed into their journals as Sakakawea.

  Phyllis Old Dog Cross and her nine brothers and sisters are the great-great-grandchildren of Cherry Necklace. Back when they were kids, Old State Road Number Eight was little more than a wheel-rutted, bone-rattling “farm-to-market” washboard of a road. Like everything else in their world, Number Eight seemed to both originate and end in Elbowoods. To the south it went to the town of Halliday, and to the north, Parshall, but a sudden spell of bad weather could keep people from going anywhere. “Our life in Elbowoods was very much like it was for our ancestors at the Knife River,” says Phyllis. Life’s necessities were readily available out
the back door, in the woods along the river, or just down the road, in town. They farmed the rich bottomlands, hunted game, and gathered food that grew wild in the hills and along the river. And just as it had been for their ancestors on the Knife and Heart Rivers, the village was still the social hub for the people of the three tribes. Forty generations of their ancestors had lived in villages in this valley. They still owned half a million acres of land straddling the river—land they possessed in perpetuity by virtue of aboriginal title that was formally recognized by the federal government at the Treaty of Horse Creek in 1851. When the Cross children were growing up, tribal members lived in nine villages that were strung out along sixty miles of river bottom like widely spaced emeralds on a silver thread.

  “Our views of how the world worked were pretty much shaped by the complexities, the nuances, the social pathologies, good and bad, of small-town relationships,” says Phyllis. “Like any close family, my friends in Parshall today are as familiar to me as they are mysterious. The world beyond the horizon can go to hell in a handbasket overnight. When the sun comes up in the morning, the roosters will crow, and those people will still be here.”

  As the Mandan people were slowly making their way up the Missouri Valley in the eleventh century, feudal Europe was languishing in a long medieval night. Thanks to extensive trade routes and favorable climate, horticulture flourished during this period throughout the Americas. Across the ocean, however, famine and disease held Europe in a death grip that kept political and social evolution in a state of arrested development. Living conditions in feudal Europe were wretched. Disease and famine ravaged the continent for centuries. For a time in the Middle Ages, widespread drought and crop failures popularized the custom of cannibalism, a practice that became pandemic across France, Scandinavia, and Germany. As Pope Urban II was convening knights and clergy at the Council of Clermont to launch the First Crusade against the infidel “Saracens” in the Holy Lands, the Aztec and Inca cultures, with their courts and theaters, their farms and extended networks of communication, were approaching their apex of cultural development. Centuries of favorable climate and material well-being helped to propagate a pre-Columbian population in the Americas that is now believed to have exceeded 100 million people.

  Sometime around the beginning of the second millennium, leaders of the Mandan society made a providential decision to push out of the increasingly crowded central lowlands of the Mississippi River Valley and turn the corner up the Missouri. The search for a new homeland could not have begun at a more auspicious time. From the outset, favorable climate followed this Siouan-speaking subgroup on their two-thousand-mile migration up the river. The weather was optimum for their gardens, and the network of trade routes that awaited them along the way on the Middle and Upper Missouri had been worn into the soil of the High Plains by thousands of years of foot traffic.

  Combined, these conditions gave the Mandan a degree of social and economic stability that they could count on from one year to the next. Professor W. Raymond Wood, the leading archaeological authority on prehistoric Village Indian culture, notes that the Mandan picked the best possible time to begin their migration. Already the Mandan were developing their own varieties of corn from seed that they acquired from the Aztecs. Through cross-pollination, they developed exotic varieties that would ripen in just seventy days. From gardens grown by the Mandan and similar agrarian societies, corn, squash, beans, and potatoes became the staple foods for people throughout the Americas. Busy trade networks also brought the inevitable exchange of religious rites and ceremonies with distant peoples such as the Hopi and the Pueblo. Over centuries, their shared cosmologies had contributed to the evolution of highly complex societies.

  Unknown to each other, the Mandan and the Arikara were approaching the Middle Missouri River Valley from opposite directions at about the same time. The Arikara, a Caddo subgroup and close relatives of the Pawnee, wandered east off the plains of modern-day Nebraska as the Mandan approached from the wooded region of the central lowlands, in modern-day Iowa. Several centuries after the Mandan and Arikara met on the Central Missouri, the Hidatsa began migrating toward the river from the north. In the mid-1500s, they finally met up with the two tribes of Village Indians near the Heart River, in modern-day North Dakota.

  After the Hidatsa established their first villages upstream from the Mandan in the sixteenth century, a dispute between the Hidatsa leaders split the tribe into two factions. One group elected to remain at the Knife while the other continued to migrate west, finally settling by the Tongue and Powder Rivers at the base of the Bighorn Mountains. These people called themselves the Children of the Long-Beaked Bird and continue to maintain close relations with their Hidatsa relatives to this day. After fur traders arrived in the late 1830s and built a trading post on the Bighorn River, the Children of the Long-Beaked Bird would be known more simply as the Crow.

  The continent’s central lowlands rise gradually from the Mississippi River Valley as they approach the foothills of the Rockies. Once the lowland ecosystem crosses the Hundredth meridian, its humid woodlands are suddenly transformed into the arid highlands of the Great Plains. There, annual precipitation drops to a meager fifteen inches, and often less. Sedimentary formations, alluvial soils, and unbroken grasslands take over as the continent’s shelf begins to climb several feet per mile. At its high point at the base of the Rocky Mountains, the continental plate bulges a mile above sea level. Despite the great geologic diversity found within this million-square-mile region, the Great Plains are regarded by scientists as a contiguous unit defined by uniform climate, geology, and similar flora and fauna. When the glaciers receded at the end of the last ice age, approximately sixteen thousand years ago, a rich but thin blanket of topsoil began building a thin mantle of nutrients that were held in place against the scouring winds by sixty species of native grass. For thousands of years, the most prominent features of this million square miles of North American landscape were wind and grass, silence, and sky.

  The Mandan quickly learned how to exploit this shift in topography. To the west, the Rocky Mountains diverted massive weather systems onto the central highlands from the Arctic and the Gulf of Mexico. Here, converging cells of unstable energy often spawned violent weather and produced extreme swings in temperature. By building their villages on the sheltered bottomlands along the river, the Mandan had effectively remained in the ecological environment of the central lowlands as they journeyed upstream. This narrow geologic niche, with its rich alluvial soils and heavy timber, acted as a two-thousand-mile extension of the central-lowland ecology they had known on the Mississippi.

  Through numerous seminomadic intermediaries, the Mandan traded seed stock with farmers of the Gulf Coast, the Southwest, and Mesoamerica. Little could they imagine how their horticultural and trading success would one day impact the larger world. The Dutch and English transplanted to Africa corn gathered from Indian gardens in the Americas. The effect of migrating seed was miraculous and immediate. A thousand-year decline in Africa’s human population reversed itself in less than a decade. By the twenty-first century, more than half of the crops grown commercially around the world—from potatoes and peppers to corn and countless varieties of squash—had originated from pre-Columbian tribal horticulture in the western hemisphere, from gardens cultivated in thousands of villages like Elbowoods.

  Then, midway through the fifteenth century, weather patterns shifted and the neo-Atlantic period that had favored the Mandan for centuries suddenly gave way to a “Little Ice Age.” The radical change in weather would continue to govern climate in the northern hemisphere for the next four hundred years. By then, the Mandan had consolidated their hold on the Upper Missouri and were rapidly expanding their trade networks, despite the sudden change in climate. Across the ocean, meanwhile, two centuries of crusading had left the royal houses of Europe in complete disarray.

  In hopes of bringing order to the political chaos, a meeting of the kings’ ministers, known as the Counci
l of Constance, was convened in 1414 to decide the thorny issue of papal succession. Perhaps at no time in history had the question of succession carried more importance. Portugal’s King Duarte had suddenly upended the balance of power in Europe by capturing and subjugating the African port city of Ceuta, opposite Gibraltar, to Portuguese authority. Duarte’s boldness inevitably drew the Spanish crown into the hunt for new lands. Since the two Iberian kings could not be trusted to resolve their differences, the rest of Europe looked to the newly installed pope, Eugenius IV, to assert his authority and reestablish order among the crown heads in the Holy Roman Empire. Eugenius IV seized the opportunity and issued a papal bull that consolidated his autocratic control over the unruly monarchs.

  The new pope’s decrees reestablished the Vatican as the dominant political force in the Holy Roman Empire. With the discovery era now well under way in Africa, it would not be long before the Spanish conquistadors were wading ashore on Caribbean beaches. Intent on winning converts to the faith, Eugenius IV and his successors made them agents of the Vatican and declared them free to do as they wished with native “heathens and infidels” that resisted conversion to Christianity. Bolstered by two centuries of experience in the Crusades, the popes could easily defend the legality of their sixteenth-century dictums. The Vatican’s discovery-era conquests in the New World could be justified by citing laws created by twelfth-century popes to take possession of foreign lands held by “heathens and infidels.”

  After scholastic philosophers of Renaissance Spain tailored the crusading-era edicts to fit into international law, Spanish conquistadors such as Cortés and Pizarro were essentially free to rape, pillage, and plunder at will in the name of exacting tribute for the Vatican and winning converts to Christendom. If citizens of the Aztec and Inca empires refused to take the holy sacrament of Christian baptism, they would suffer the consequences. Crusading-era law had now landed on the shores of the Americas.