Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People

Elizabeth A. Fenn

Mar 2014 · Macmillan + ORM

About this ebook

This Pulitzer Prize–winning work pieces together the lost history of the Mandan Native Americans and their thriving society on the Upper Missouri River.

The Mandan people’s bustling towns in present-day North Dakota were at the center of the North American universe for centuries. Yet their history has been nearly forgotten, maintained in fragmentary documents and the journals of white visitors such as Lewis and Clark.

In this extraordinary book, Elizabeth A. Fenn pieces together those fragments along with important new discoveries in archaeology, anthropology, geology, climatology, epidemiology, and nutritional science. The result is a bold new perspective on early American history, a new interpretation of the American past.

By 1500, more than twelve thousand Mandans were established on the northern Plains, and their commercial prowess, agricultural skills, and reputation for hospitality became famous. Recent archaeological discoveries show how they thrived—and how they collapsed. The damage wrought by imported diseases like smallpox and the havoc caused by the arrival of horses and steamboats were tragic for the Mandans, yet, as Fenn makes clear, their sense of themselves as a people with distinctive traditions endured.

About the author

Elizabeth A. Fenn is an associate professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she holds the Walter and Lucienne Driskill Chair in Western American History. She is the coauthor of Natives and Newcomers and the author of the award-winning Pox Americana (Hill & Wang, 2001). She lives in Longmont, Colorado.