Corn occupied an important place in the lives of many Native communities that lived along the Upper Missouri River. In this landmark book, George F. Will and GeorgeøE. Hyde introduce readers to some fifty varieties of native corn discovered in the Missouri Valley. Equally important, they provide an indispensable overview of Indian agricultural techniques there, including methods of harvesting and storing the crop, the preparation of corn for food, and the role of the crop in intertribal and Indian-white trade. Corn was not only grown, traded, and eaten, it also had spiritual significance. A final contribution of this book is a discussion of the presence and value of corn in American Indian myth, religion, and ritual.

The Plains Indian of the Upper Missouri in the nineteenth-century buffalo days remains the widely recognized symbol of primitive man par excellence–and the persistent image of the North American Indian at his most romantic. Fifteen cultural highlights, each a chapter made from research for a particular subject and enriched by contemporary illustrations, provide a sensitive interpretation of tribes such as the Blackfeet, the Crows, and the Mandans from the decades before Lewis and Clark up to the present. In an attempt to understand and record the old culture of the Indians, the author has developed, over the past 30 years, a special ethnohistorical approach. The results, as seen here, are enlightening both for other ethnohistorians and for historians of more or less conventional bent. This book is abundantly illustrated from historical sources.

Describes the customs and manners of five Missouri Indian tribes by the author who was a fur trader in Missouri for more than twenty years.

Although the American Fur Company dominated the Upper Missouri fur trade during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, a number of small, independent firms (known as the "Opposition") flourished briefly at this time. From 1858 until 1862, a young Philadelphian, Henry A. Boller, was one of the Opposition traders, serving first as clerk in Clark, Primeau and Company and then as a partner in Larpenteur, Smith and Company. His account of these years, based on his journals, presents a remarkably realistic picture of the daily life of the Indian as he existed more than a century ago and is recognized as the "most authoritative narrative of fur-trading among the plains Indians of the Upper Missouri, for the period" (U.S.iana). When it appeared in 1868, Boller's book was subtitled "Eight Years in the Far West, 1858-1866, Embracing Sketches of Montana and Salt Lake," and included descriptions of a return visit to Fort Berthold, the newly discovered Montana gold fields, and the Mormon capital. These concluding chapters are omitted in the present volume.

A thriving fur trade post between 1830 and 1860, Fort Clark, in what is today western North Dakota, also served as a way station for artists, scientists, missionaries, soldiers, and other western chroniclers traveling along the Upper Missouri River. The written and visual legacies of these visitors—among them the German prince-explorer Maximilian of Wied, Swiss artist Karl Bodmer, and American painter-author George Catlin—have long been the primary sources of information on the cultures of the Mandan and Hidatsa Indians, the peoples who met the first fur traders in the area. This book, by a team of anthropologists, is the first thorough account of the fur trade at Fort Clark to integrate new archaeological evidence with the historical record. The Mandans built a village in about 1822 near the site of what would become Fort Clark; after the 1837 smallpox epidemic that decimated them, the village was occupied by Arikaras until they abandoned it in 1862. Because it has never been plowed, the site of Fort Clark and the adjacent Mandan/Arikara village are rich in archaeological information. The authors describe the environmental and cultural setting of the fort (named after William Clark of the Lewis and Clark expedition), including the social profile of the fur traders who lived there. They also chronicle the histories of the Mandans and the Arikaras before and during the occupation of the post and the village. The authors conclude by assessing the results—published here for the first time—of the archaeological program that investigated the fort and adjacent Indian villages at Fort Clark State Historic Site. By vividly depicting the conflict and cooperation in and around the fort, this book reveals the various cultures’ interdependence.