Mandan

The Mandan are a Native American tribe of the Great Plains who for centuries lived along both banks of the upper Missouri River and its Heart and Knife tributaries in the Dakotas, famed as kind hosts and corn growers. Speakers of a Siouan-Catawban language, they built one of the most settled farming cultures of the Plains: permanent villages of great round earth lodges up to forty feet across ringed a central plaza, where matrilineal families stored immense corn surpluses. The Mandan were the great traders of the middle Missouri, exchanging corn for bison meat and fat, horses and guns with nomadic visitors from a hundred nations. Their Okipa ceremony, with its four-day buffalo dance and ordeals, awed European witnesses. The smallpox winter of 1837 destroyed nearly the whole nation in months; survivors joined the Hidatsa and Arikara as the Three Affiliated Tribes of the Fort Berthold Reservation, where about half the Mandan still live.