Encounters at the Heart of the World

By June 1806, twenty-five years had passed since the smallpox epidemic of 1781. But once again, the Mandans and their neighbors were dying from an Old World contagion. This illness started as a tickle in the throat, a mild fever, and a general malaise. Then a dry, hacking cough took hold. What followed, however, was not so mundane. After two weeks or so, a killer cough set in, attacking in fits so fierce that victims felt they were suffocating, as indeed they often were. Many vomited from coughing so hard. The labored gasps of some sufferers made the distinctive sound that gave the disease its common name: whooping cough. Physicians call it pertussis. At its worst, it causes seizures, asphyxiation, and death.2

Among the Mandans and Hidatsas in June 1806, the fur trader Charles McKenzie described the illness as a “violent Cough,” a “Chincough,” and a “Hooping Cough.”3 Alexander Henry, who visited the villages in July, observed it as well. “The natives here at present are mostly affected with a bad cough which takes some of them off,” he wrote. “It is a kind of Hooping Cough.” Henry noted that the epidemic extended beyond the upper Missouri to “the Red and Assineboine Rivers and even to Fort des Prairies and several other parts in the Northwest.” Fort des Prairies was near present-day Edmonton, Alberta. In the Knife River towns, the sound of healing songs and drumming filled the air. So did lamentations. McKenzie was glad for the noise, since it masked the groaning, coughing, and wheezing of the victims.4

Mortality from whooping cough typically runs highest in children, and anecdotal evidence suggests this was the case in this 1806 outbreak. Those who succumbed, McKenzie wrote, were “the old men & women” and “the Children.” The Indians’ “attention to their Children was great,” he added.5 A death toll is hard to calculate. The whooping cough, according to Henry, “carried off numbers of people.” McKenzie was more concrete. “It was not a strange thing to see two or three dead in the same Lodge at once,” he said. The villagers told him the infection “carried away, by their own calculation, 130 souls old & young in less than a months time.” But McKenzie wrote this before the epidemic ended. A case of pertussis can last six weeks. No one knows how many died after the first “130 souls.”6

KNIFE RIVER VILLAGES, AUGUST 13, 1806

The coughing and wheezing may yet have continued on August 13, when Hidatsa scouts, peering upriver from a hilltop, spotted a white pirogue and a string of canoes floating down the Missouri River. The next day, the booming of blunderbusses brought residents to the shoreline as the flotilla approached the villages. The Corps of Discovery was back.7

There were greetings and there were tears, as a Hidatsa chief explained that his son had just died in a fight with the Blackfeet. But the expedition dallied only a few minutes among the Hidatsas before heading downstream, where the Mandans of Ruptare and Mitutanka welcomed back their old friends. “We were visited by all the inhabitants of this village,” wrote Clark of Ruptare. All were “well pleased” to see the captains and their men.8

The Ruptares, on the east bank of the Missouri, had rebuilt their town during the expedition’s sixteen-month absence. Clark noticed that it was smaller. When he asked, the Indians told him “a quarrel had taken place.” Some lodges had left Black Cat’s town for the other side of the river, where they probably moved in with their neighbors at Mitutanka.9

Later in the day, the Mandan and Hidatsa chiefs smoked a pipe of tobacco with the captains and listened as Clark reiterated his old plea for peace among the tribes. Then the captains made an offer. They invited the chiefs “to visit their great father the president of the U. States and to hear his own Councils” in Washington, D.C. The U.S. government would bear all the expenses of the trip, they said. And to sweeten the deal, it would send them back “with a considerable present in merchendize which you will recive of your great Father.” All of this would hasten the opening of trade with the United States.10

The chiefs listened and thought. They almost certainly viewed trade as an unalloyed good. That was the Mandan-Hidatsa approach to the world. But this journey was a different matter. Enemies lurked everywhere: Blackfeet, Shoshones, Cheyennes, Arikaras, and Lakotas. A downstream passage meant travel through both Sioux and Arikara territory. The Arikaras might be managed. But the Lakotas? They were volatile and dangerous.

Each man processed the possibilities, the risks, the benefits. The completion of such a trip meant life experience, wisdom, and a keener understanding of the Mandan-Hidatsa place in the universe. It meant benefits for the villagers. It meant commerce. It meant presents distributed and admiration accrued. It meant prestige for those who returned. But it could only occur at great risk and at great cost to a traveler’s xo′pini.

Black Cat spoke first. “He wished to Visit the United States and his Great Father,” Clark reported, “but was afraid of the Scioux.” The Lakotas had killed several Mandans while Lewis and Clark were gone. They would “Certainly kill him if he attempted to go down.” Clark promised protection, but the matter was closed. The chief stood by his refusal, saying only that he would send the men “Some corn tomorrow.”11

Next came One Eye, the powerful Hidatsa headman. He had taken the captains’ earlier counsel to heart, he said, and forged peace with the Shoshones and Cheyennes. He “wished to go down and See his great father very much.” But he too feared the Sioux. They stood “in the road,” and they “would most certainly kill him or any others.”12 One Eye would not go.

Clark later went to see Black Cat at Ruptare, reiterating his invitation and emphasizing the “bountifull gifts &c.” that the chief and his people would receive. Wouldn’t someone, anyone, go meet the great father? A young man stepped forward and “offered to go down.” The Mandans “all agreed,” pleased to gain the benefits of the journey without risking a beloved chief. But the volunteer was a scoundrel, Clark learned. He “reproached” the Mandans “for wishing to Send Such a man.”13

Perhaps a Mitutanka Mandan would be willing. Clark crossed the river and looked in on Little Crow. The prospects were promising. “He told me he had deturmined to go down,” Clark said, “but wished to have a council first with his people.” The council was to meet later in the day. The captain smoked with Little Crow and returned to camp.

The next day, as he awaited an answer from Little Crow, Clark tried unsuccessfully to coax another Hidatsa chief into making the trip, and then decided to walk to Mitutanka to learn the council’s decision. The meeting had been contentious, a “jellousy” had erupted between Little Crow and Sheheke, and now Little Crow refused to go.14

Clark was desperate. He believed U.S. influence depended on having well-placed insiders—respected leaders with firm ties of friendship to the federal government—in key Indian nations. He summoned René Jusseaume and asked him to put pressure on the Mandan headmen, promising to hire him as interpreter for the trip if he succeeded.15

Jusseaume disappeared and quickly returned, having arranged a plan that suited his interests. He reported that Sheheke—the White Coyote—would come along, but only if others could come too: Sheheke’s wife and his son, plus Jusseaume’s own wife and children.16

It is impossible to say what distinguished the chief born at On-a-Slant from the others. The White Coyote was now around forty years old. He had survived the smallpox, the whooping cough, and the growing aggression of the Sioux. He had borne witness to the contraction of the Mandan population and the northward migration from the Heart River to the Knife. He had also seen a trickle of upper-Missouri newcomers grow into a swelling stream. But the other Mandan headmen in his age cohort shared in these experiences. Something—perhaps a blend of curiosity, commitment, and xo´pini—gave Sheheke the courage to make the journey.

On August 17, the Mandans bade a tearful goodbye to their emissaries. Clark found Sheheke’s earth lodge filled with well-wishers: “the men were Setting in a circle Smokeing and the womin Crying.” As they walked to the riverside, “Maney of them Cried out aloud.” The chiefs from all the towns were present, and they paused at the water’s edge to smoke one last pipe. Sheheke then put “his arm around all the head mens necks of his nation,” and “took his leave,” wrote John Ordway. The canoes—some lashed together into catamarans—nosed their way into the timeless current of the Missouri River.17

Figure 11.1. Sheheke—“Big White,” portrait by Févret de Saint-Mémin. Sheheke and Yellow Corn both sat for this French painter in January 1807, during their stay in Washington, D.C. Both portraits bear dual (and conflicting) labels. It is most likely that this is indeed Sheheke, but there is a chance it actually portrays an Iowa Indian man.

The eastward journey, through the rough-and-tumble backcountry of the early republic, covered 2,700 miles and took more than four months. But on December 28, 1806, the White Coyote, his wife Yellow Corn, and his son White Painted House arrived at the U.S. seat of government.18

WASHINGTON, D.C., DECEMBER 29, 1806

At the time of Sheheke’s visit, the new federal capital was a work in progress. Washington was growing, but its inhabitants—enslaved and free combined—barely numbered more than those of the Knife River towns. The city’s population size was nowhere close to that of the combined Heart River villages during Sheheke’s youth.19

The night after they arrived, the Mandans attended the theater to see a production called Manfredi’s Exhibition. The acts included tightrope walking, strength and agility feats, Cossack dancing, and an exotic fandango in which Mr. Manfredi pranced over eggs without breaking them.20

A young British diplomat named Augustus J. Foster also attended the show, and he watched the Mandans in the audience as much as he watched the entertainers on stage. Foster reported that Yellow Corn and Jusseaume’s wife delighted in the performance, “grinning and giggling” and remarking on it out loud. Asked the import of his wife’s repeated exclamations, Jusseaume replied that they meant “that is great effect of medicine.” For the unnamed woman of the plains, the spirit world had a hand in the thrill of the Washington theater.21 Sheheke also enjoyed the entertainment, but he tried to retain decorum. “He endeavoured as much as he could to hide his laughter,” Foster said, “pulling and pinching his cheeks and chin but all in vain.”22

Then, during an “interlude” in the production—or possibly at the end—the visiting Indians themselves were asked to perform. The Mandans were not the only Native Americans in the house. The audience also included a Delaware man and five Osages from an earlier delegation sent by Lewis and Clark. Seven Indian men, including Sheheke, took the floor. Three drummed and sang while three enacted a battle scene and performed the calumet. Sheheke may have felt ambivalent about this spectacle. Rather than drumming, singing, or joining in with the others, he preferred quiet dignity. Someone brought out an armchair to serve as his throne. This, Foster said, was “meant as a Royal distinction towards him in order to qualify the[ir] making him exhibit before the public.”23

Two days later, the Indians danced at another Manfredi show. William Plumer, a senator and Baptist minister from New Hampshire, was in the audience. “I was not pleased with these savage dances,” he wrote. He found the music unpleasant and the dancing “not graceful.” But Sheheke impressed the finicky preacher. Once again he sat quietly on stage and “took no part in the exercise.” He “was dressed well” and had light-colored skin, Plumer noted approvingly.24

WASHINGTON, D.C., DECEMBER 30, 1806

The Mandans had offered the Corps of Discovery unbridled hospitality at a crucial point in their expedition. Jefferson had read the captains’ letters about this, and he had imagined their station on the upper Missouri River. Now he would finally meet the man whom Lewis had elevated—at least in the president’s mind—to “the great Cheif of the Mandan nation.” So keen was Jefferson to impress this dignitary that he had invited him to stop at Monticello on the way to Washington. “Perhaps while in our neighborhood,” the Virginian said, Sheheke might want “to take a ride to Monticello and see in what manner I have arranged the tokens of friendship I have received from his country.” In fact, he added, he was in the midst of “preparing a kind of Indian Hall” in his home.25

Whether or not the Monticello visit took place—there is no evidence either way—the fact that the Mandans were farmers must have heightened Jefferson’s interest. Tillers of the soil were at the center of his vision for the United States. “Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people,” he once wrote. If there was a native people who approached the Jeffersonian ideal, the Mandans were it. Would the slaveholding president’s vision include native nations in which the women did the planting? In the end it did not, but he did plant Mandan corn, sent to him by Lewis and Clark, at his Monticello garden.26

The December 30 meeting between Jefferson and Sheheke probably took place at the newly finished executive mansion, the building we know as the White House. Information about this formal encounter comes not from Sheheke but from Jefferson, in the form of a speech he gave on the occasion. Addressing himself to “the Wolf,” as he called Sheheke, “and the people of the Mandan nation,” he thanked his guest for making the long journey to Washington, and thanked the Mandans for their kindness to Lewis and Clark and for listening to what the captains had to say.27

Then the architect of the Louisiana Purchase proceeded to the agenda at hand. A new era had dawned on the upper Missouri River, he explained. “The French, the English, the Spaniards” had agreed to “retire from all the country which you and we hold between Canada and Mexico.” They were “never to return again.”28

Strange words indeed, but what Jefferson said about the French and Spanish made sense. The French were gone, though many Frenchmen still worked with British companies. And the Spanish, aside from John Evans, had never had a presence among the Mandans. But when Sheheke had left the Knife River less than five months before, the place had teemed with British traders—so many, in fact, that they competed with one another. And he had yet to see a U.S.-affiliated trader among his people. How, he might have wondered, did the United States propose to expel the British? How could they even presume to do so? The Mandans themselves determined who entered their towns. Commerce was their lifeway. Anyone with good intentions was welcome.

And what was this business of joint ownership—this reference to “the country which you and we hold”? The Mandans had never given or sold any part of their country to the United States, nor had they agreed to any joint ownership scheme.

Other parts of Jefferson’s speech echoed what Lewis and Clark had already said. He wished them “to live in peace and friendship with one another as brethren of the same family ought to do.” No evidence survives to indicate Sheheke’s thoughts or response, but earlier discussions with the captains had made Mandan views clear. The Knife River villagers relished peace. Peace meant commerce. Peace meant women and girls plying their hoes without fear. “We wish to be at peace with all and do not make war upon any,” Black Cat had said. But they had to defend themselves, and they had to avenge assaults committed against them. The Mandans were not pacifists, but according to their rhetoric, they never made war “without Cause.”29

President Jefferson, like the emissaries he sent west, promised that the future would yield trade and prosperity for everyone. In the year just ending, Congress had created a post for a superintendent of Indian trade, and in the coming year a bank building on M Street was to be converted into headquarters for the operation. In short, Indian trade was a government priority, and Jefferson promised Sheheke that Captain Lewis would direct the location of trading posts “to be convenient to you all.” He would also determine the selection of merchandise the posts carried. This sounded like a Mandan utopia. “Your numbers will be increased instead of diminishing,” Jefferson said, “and you will live in plenty and in quiet.”30

Sheheke had witnessed a precipitous decline in Mandan numbers and influence in his lifetime. The great father was now promising a change of course. No one can say what ran through his head while he listened to René Jusseaume translate the president’s words. But if Jefferson could deliver, the future looked bright as the visitors prepared to watch the capital welcome another new year.

WASHINGTON, D.C., JANUARY 1, 1807

New Year’s Day was a whirlwind. In the early afternoon, Sheheke, Yellow Corn, and White Painted House attended the president’s annual levee, a festive gathering with a “great concourse of people,” said Senator Plumer. Here the Indians met senators and representatives, cabinet members, diplomats, and other dignitaries. President Jefferson, like his Mandan guests, was renowned for hospitality. His New Year’s Day board included “a great plenty of ice creams, apple pies, cakes, & a variety of wines.”31 In the evening, the upper-Missouri delegation went to Manfredi’s Exhibition again.

WASHINGTON, D.C., JANUARY 1807

During their time in the federal city, Yellow Corn and Sheheke both sat for portraits. The artist was Charles Balthazar Julien Févret de Saint-Mémin, a political refugee who had fled the French Revolution in 1789 and turned to portraiture to make his living in the United States. The Mandans’ time-honored visual arts differed markedly from the detailed realism of Euro-American portraiture. Mandan images, especially those created by men, emphasized stylized, narrative representation. But we know that in the early 1830s, when George Catlin and Karl Bodmer went to Mih-tutta-hang-kusch, their work fascinated the Mandans. Saint-Mémin’s drawings and watercolors likewise may have intrigued Sheheke and Yellow Corn in 1807. The couple probably sat for the artist at the Rhodes Hotel. Their likenesses are among the very first representations by a nonnative of northern plains peoples.32

Figure 11.2. Sheheke’s Wife, Yellow Corn, portrait by Févret de Saint-Mémin. This portrait, like Sheheke’s, bore two labels. The subject here is probably Yellow Corn; if not, it is an Iowa Indian woman.

WASHINGTON, D.C., JANUARY 14, 1807

In order for Clark to be present, the City of Washington had already postponed its celebratory banquet for Lewis and Clark for four days. But the expedition coleader still had not appeared. On January 14, the dinner went ahead anyway. The table was “well spread,” and the National Intelligencer reported that everyone at the splendid occasion “seemed to be deeply impressed with a sentiment of gratitude, mingled with an elevation of mind, on setting down at the festive board.”33

When the feast ended, the toasts began: to “The People,” to “The Constitution,” to “The President,” to “Franklin,” to “Peace,” to “The Army and Navy” and more—seventeen toasts to mark the seventeen states of the union. Amid intervals of music and song, the diners may have lifted their glasses toward Sheheke as well. One toast invoked “The Council Fire,” and another gave a nod to “The Red People of America.”34

There were also speeches invoking the celebrated English sea captain James Cook and the French explorer-admiral Louis Antoine de Bougainville. The poet-politician Joel Barlow recited an extended rhyme, “On the Discoveries of Captain Lewis,” composed for the occasion. Even the steamboat wizard Robert Fulton, a friend of Barlow’s, got into the act, raising his glass to “The American Eagle—When she expands her wings from the Atlantic to the Pacific, may she quench her thirst in both.”35

In years to come, the vessels that Fulton and other entrepreneurs sent churning up the nation’s waterways would promote the very expansion he toasted. They steamed past the Knife River villages, past the Yellowstone River confluence, and stopped only in present Montana, where the Great Falls of the Missouri kept them from going farther.36

MITUTANKA, SEPTEMBER—“MOON OF THE RIPE CORN”—180937

Manuel Lisa—a Spaniard born in New Orleans in 1772—was never popular among the French-identified fur traders of St. Louis, but his immense ambition allowed him to succeed in the Missouri River trade. In 1807, while Sheheke and his family were in Washington, Lisa took two keelboats up the Missouri past the Knife River villages and then followed the Yellowstone River upstream another two hundred miles. Here, where the Bighorn flows into the Yellowstone in what is now south-central Montana, he and his men built a post called Fort Raymond. It was the first trading post under U.S. auspices on the upper-Missouri watershed.38

Fort Raymond was a harbinger of things to come. When Lisa returned downstream with a bounty of furs in 1808, the St. Louis men set their prejudices aside: The Chouteaus, William Clark, and others joined with him to form the St. Louis Missouri Fur Company, a trading outfit that was soon reorganized into the more agreeably titled Missouri Fur Company. The years to come brought many more reconfigurations and name alterations, yet one thing was certain: Even if partners and companies changed, the commerce between St. Louis and the upper Missouri was open for good.39

On a late September day in 1809, the thunderous report of a military salute brought the Mandans of Mitutanka swarming to the riverbank. The salvo came from a fleet of St. Louis Missouri Fur Company barges forging their way upstream. Sheheke, Yellow Corn, and White Painted House were coming home. Villagers crowded onto the barges when they landed. According to the fur-trade entrepreneur and expedition leader Pierre Chouteau, they greeted their long-absent chief and his family “with the Greatest demonstration of Joy.”40 Three years after it began, Sheheke’s journey was finally over.

Sheheke’s brother—or more accurately the women of his brother’s family—hosted a sumptuous dinner to celebrate. “We found a plentiful supply of provisions,” wrote one of Sheheke’s escorts. “The ladies,” alerted to the arrival days in advance, “had prepared a large stew of meat, corn, and vegetables, and our feast was seasoned by genuine hospitality.” During an archetypal Mandan reception, participants no doubt heard their first reports of what the chief and his family had seen in the East, visiting Washington City, Philadelphia, and probably Baltimore and New York too. The Mandan tourists would have seen burgeoning populations in these cities, streets lined with multistory buildings, and docks jammed with ships and stevedores; they may even have seen the Atlantic Ocean.41

By spring 1807, they were back in St. Louis and eager to head home, but they remained maddeningly dependent on their hosts. In May, Sheheke, Yellow Corn, and White Painted House headed up the Missouri with Nathaniel Pryor, a former member of the Corps of Discovery. But Ensign Pryor’s expedition, with thirty-three fur traders and fourteen soldiers, only got as far as present-day South Dakota, where Arikaras and Teton Sioux stopped them in a battle that took the lives of four of Pryor’s men.42 The flotilla headed back to St. Louis, and the Mandan family faced an interminable wait—first one year and then another.

Sheheke grew frustrated and impatient during his tedious interlude in St. Louis. A Missouri official found him “trifling and vexatious,” acting as though he were “the ‘Brother’ and not the ‘Son’ of the President”43—a predictable Anglo-American critique of a self-possessed, assertive Native American leader. Sheheke had good reason to be vexatious, given the protracted delays in his return home. Still, whatever his discontents, the unplanned hiatus gave Sheheke more time to learn some English and adapt to the complex, unfamiliar ways of his hosts.

The White Coyote’s lingering presence in St. Louis was a thorn in the side of U.S. officials there. They had made promises, boasting to the Mandans of their power and commercial prowess. Yet now they could not even get the chief and his family upriver to their home. Worse, the new governor of the Louisiana Territory was Meriwether Lewis, and he was not coping well. Jefferson had previously expressed nothing but the warmest affection for his protégé. “You would be one of my family,” he had said in 1801, when he invited Lewis to become his personal secretary. His esteem for the young man had been nearly boundless.44 But now Jefferson berated him. “Since I parted from you in Sep. last I have never had a line from you,” the president wrote in July 1808. Sheheke had to get home, and Lewis had to make it happen. “The present letter … is written to put an end at length to this mutual silence, and to ask from you a communication of what you think best done to get the chief & his family back.” The “good faith” and “reputation of the nation” depended on it, he fumed.45

It took another year for Sheheke to get back to his people. Lewis eventually made a deal with Pierre Chouteau and the St. Louis Missouri Fur Company to do the work, and four months after leaving St. Louis in May 1809, Sheheke, Yellow Corn, and White Painted House disembarked at Mitutanka.46 Meriwether Lewis’s death by suicide occurred less than four weeks later.

BIG HIDATSA, LATE SEPTEMBER 1809

The autumn of 1809 was a troubled time for Sheheke as well. After the celebratory banquet in Mitutanka, the villagers presented him with “an elegant horse,” and the chief set out to visit the Hidatsas, donning the dress uniform he had received as a gift from the United States. He draped his steed in a scarlet housing with gold-lace trim, on which he placed a “highly mounted saddle.” Then, with “30 or 40” Mandans and an unknown number of fur-company men, he rode northwest six miles to Big Hidatsa, where Pierre Chouteau called a meeting of Mandans and Hidatsas together.47 The two tribes had recently quarreled, and relations were tense.

The Big Hidatsa chief One Eye had just “a few days before murdered one of the principal men of the mandans,” Chouteau reported, and this may have affected what unfolded next. The Mandan entourage entered Big Hidatsa and rode to the central plaza, where Sheheke expected to greet One Eye. But the Hidatsa chief snubbed the visitors by dawdling inside his earth lodge while Sheheke waited awkwardly outside among the onlookers.48 One Eye eventually emerged, and Chouteau opened the proceedings. As he spoke, the bystanders waited restlessly, “impatient for the presents which they expected” Sheheke to distribute. At last, Chouteau indicated it was time to do so.49

Two eyewitness accounts—a letter from Chouteau and a narrative written by a man known only as Dr. Thomas—concur about what happened next: Sheheke did not hand out presents, saying, according to Chouteau, that “the presents he had brought were not to be distributed, they were all his own.” The people’s “hopes were in vain,” Dr. Thomas wrote, since Sheheke “was as anxious to retain his property, as they were to receive it.” A murmur rippled through the assemblage.50

Chouteau feared a rupture between the Mandans and the Hidatsas, riled already by their recent differences. In order “to Prevent Any further misunderstandings” and “to appease the Jealousies” Sheheke had so flagrantly exacerbated, the fur trader presented a “large medal and flag” to One Eye and disbursed gifts of his own: gunpowder, ammunition, tobacco, and vermilion—the red dye prized by Indians for use as face and body paint. These items, Chouteau noted, “seemed to restore harmony amongst them.” But for Sheheke the damage was done. Dr. Thomas reported that when the chief rode out of Big Hidatsa, “his popularity was on the decline.”51

Generosity was the hallmark of a Mandan chief. Tight-fisted men rarely earned respect, and Sheheke had surely earned renown for selflessness in years gone by. Moreover, he was not a war chief but a civil chief, a position attained largely by wisdom and charity. Such Mandan leaders, as Alfred Bowers found, were “thoughtful of others,” “gave frequent feasts,” and were “able to settle little quarrels within the village.” Although it was not a requirement, most chiefs gave the Okipa ceremony at least once in their lives. Did Sheheke withhold gifts from Mandans and Hidatsas alike? Or did he just hold them back from the Hidatsas to make a statement about One Eye’s recent action and the brewing turmoil between the two tribes?52

The White Coyote’s ties to the United States may shed light on his behavior. As we have seen, North West Company men trekking overland from their Assiniboine River posts stopped first at Big Hidatsa and other Hidatsa towns. The men visited the Mandans too, but the Hidatsas inevitably exploited their own geographic advantage, working to ensure that they got better prices and a better selection of goods. For good reason, they sought to protect their preferential position. Two days before Sheheke’s return—right around the time that the “quarrel” between the Mandans and Hidatsas erupted in violence—British traders had fled the Mandan villages for fear of “being Detained” by the St. Louis men due soon with the chief. Although another British group appeared a few weeks later, the dispute between the two tribes may have arisen because of the British departure, the impending U.S. arrival, and the larger implications of both for Hidatsa trade.53

For their part, the Mandans were equally aware that geographic location—even a few miles—made a difference. Alexander Henry had noted in 1806 that the Mandans were “always anxious to prevent” traders from taking their goods “to other Villages,” recognizing that the commercial advantage went to whoever intercepted them first.54 While the Hidatsas looked northward, the Mandans had recently come to look southward. At their downstream position, they had been the first to greet Lewis and Clark, and they had made sure the Corps wintered on Mandan turf—a maneuver that generated bonds of friendship destined to strengthen in the future when other U.S. visitors stopped first among the Mandans. Both One Eye and Sheheke understood this dynamic.

Of course, it is possible that the Mandans too received no gifts from their returning leader. Dr. Thomas noted the headman’s “splendid uniform and house furniture, his fine figure,” and “his anxiety to appear to advantage.” Thomas had his own interpretation of Sheheke’s actions: The items the chief had “received from the American government … had rendered him, in his opinion, the greatest man in his country.”55 Yet conspicuous display—if Sheheke really engaged in it—was not a route to prestige among Mandans. The White Coyote may have adopted new ways during his time in St. Louis, or the records generated by non-Indian observers might have misconstrued his actions, attitudes, and circumstances.

Pierre Chouteau returned to St. Louis soon thereafter, but Manuel Lisa stayed longer, building a little blockhouse named Fort Mandan near the Mandan-Hidatsa towns. The remains of Lisa’s post, like those of Lewis and Clark’s fort of the same name, have never been found.

MITUTANKA, 1811

They traveled in separate parties, but in the summer of 1811, two friends converged at Sheheke’s town of Mitutanka. Henry Marie Brackenridge was a frontier lawyer who dabbled in natural history and Native American ethnography. John Bradbury was a working-class Briton whose botanical skills had brought him to the attention of the Linnaean Society and the celebrated scientist Joseph Banks. Brackenridge traveled with a Missouri Fur Company party led by Manuel Lisa, while Bradbury accompanied a Pacific Fur Company group known as the Astorians. (He left this ill-fated crew before it continued west to rendezvous with an ocean-borne counterpart at the mouth of the Columbia River).56

Riding overland from the Arikaras, Bradbury and his companions got to Mitutanka on June 22, 1811. The Mandans, as usual, had advance notice of the visitors’ approach. From a distance, the botanist saw “the tops of the lodges crowded with people,” many of whom descended to shake hands when he and the others arrived and dismounted. The villagers conducted their guests to Yellow Corn’s earth lodge, where Sheheke greeted them. “Come in house,” the chief said in English.57

Inside the lodge, the sight of “a fine dunghill cock”—one of the presents the chief had received during his east-coast tour—took Bradbury by surprise.58 The rooster was hardly exotic, but on the upper Missouri it was an oddity, and it was surely the only domesticated fowl in Mitutanka. The cock in Yellow Corn’s earth lodge may seem inconsequential, but it is striking that in the two years since Sheheke had returned from his trip to Washington, he had not given his distinctive possession away. His prestige, after all, depended in large part on displays of generosity.

As the guests smoked and ate with Sheheke, Bradbury admired the alacrity with which Yellow Corn produced a hearty meal. The next day, while the botanist swatted mosquitoes at Lisa’s little trading post, the Mandan headman came to visit, wearing the “suit of clothes brought with him from the United States,” Bradbury said. “He informed us that he had a great wish to go live with the whites, and that several of his people, induced by the representations he had made of the white people’s mode of living, had the same intentions.”59

When Henry Marie Brackenridge arrived three days later, the two naturalists toured the villages and investigated the surrounding countryside together. On July 4, Brackenridge said, they “had something like a celebration of the day.” Sheheke and the Hidatsa chief One Eye joined them, but the old enemies remained at odds. On “one or two occasions,” Brackenridge said, he saw One Eye “treat She-he-ke with great contempt.” The Hidatsa leader could barely countenance his Mandan counterpart. “What?” One Eye asked. “Does that bag of lies pretend to have any authority here?” Sheheke was purportedly “a fat man, not much distinguished as a warrior, and extremely talkative, a fault much despised amongst the Indians.”60

If it was real, we must try to see Sheheke’s desire to live “with the whites” in its Mandan context. The White Coyote came from a world marked by social and cultural elasticity. The villagers “encourage the perpetual presence of Strangers,” as Charles McKenzie put it. The linguistic and cultural skills of non-Mandans, especially those adopted as kin, promoted commerce and diplomacy. Such people could even serve “as ambassadors to distant Nations for the arrangement of differences.” Mandans had for centuries recognized the value of assimilating strangers from neighboring plains tribes; more recently they had embraced others from distant New World settlements of Europeans. Residenters like René Jusseaume and Toussaint Charbonneau proved the villagers’ receptivity to outsiders.61

No one knows if the White Coyote had in mind becoming a Mandan go-between in his own right or whether he imagined a more complete separation from his people and his culture. It seems likely that he wanted an accommodation that would turn his unique skills, stature, and experiences to advantage. Sheheke’s biographer, Tracy Potter, speculates that he may have foreseen a sort of a Mandan ambassadorship, in which he gave his people a voice in foreign halls of power, or that he may simply have hoped for a quiet life in a more modest capacity. Only one thing seems certain: Sheheke’s time in the East had changed his understanding of the world. Beyond this, the questions are many and the answers are few.62

FORT MANUEL, AUGUST 27, 1812

Like so many other historic sites along the Missouri River, the remains of the post called Fort Manuel succumbed in the twentieth century to the activities of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The little trading house sat in Arikara country, barely south of the present border between North and South Dakota. As its name suggests, it was another of Manuel Lisa’s enterprises under the auspices of the Missouri Fur Company. A company clerk named John Luttig helped build it in the summer of 1812.63

The timing was not good. Britain and the United States were already clashing in the initial encounters of the War of 1812. The upper-Missouri peoples were far from the main theaters of conflict, but they sat at an important intersection of British and U.S. influences—the British reaching southwest from Canada and the United States reaching northwest from St. Louis. Rumors and agitation were general. Even though the northern plains did not become a major battleground, isolated acts of violence curtailed commerce. Luttig’s journal describes seven uneasy months from August 1812 to March 1813.64

When war erupted, the Hidatsas had special reasons to support the British. Their northerly position at the Knife River, as One Eye understood, gave them a strong affinity with British traders, a preference shared by most of the northern tribes.65 The Mandans supported the United States. After Sheheke’s journey, they were increasingly aware that they might benefit (in both absolute and relative terms) if future trade flowed up to them from the Mississippi rather than down from the Assiniboine.

Because of tensions between the Missouri Company men and the British-inclined Hidatsas, Lisa shut down his operations among the Knife River villagers in early August 1812, so Mandans wanting to do business with St. Louis traders now had to travel south to Fort Manuel. Sheheke did so in late August, reaching the post on August 27, while its construction was still ongoing. John Luttig noted the event in his diary: “Thursday 27, clear and fresh, the Big White, Mandan Chief arrived, with several of his Bravos and family, to pay a visit.” Sheheke’s motives appear to have been commercial and diplomatic. As a chief, it behooved him to see the new post and meet its keepers, but he also “had a few Robes, which he traded, and took some articles on Credit.”66

Luttig’s journal entry is the last known report of Sheheke alive. Less than six weeks later, on October 3, two Mandans came to Fort Manuel at sunset. They brought “the sad news of the Big white … being killed.” The attackers were Hidatsas, Luttig noted, although Mandan tradition has also implicated the Sioux. Aside from the death of Sheheke, the Mandans got the best of the battle, but the Mitutanka chief who had forged such strong bonds with the United States in the previous eight years was now gone. The War of 1812 was taking a toll.67

FORT MANUEL, DECEMBER 20, 1812

Several months later, John Luttig noted another loss in his journal. “This Evening,” he wrote on December 20, 1812, “the Wife of Charbonneau a Snake [Shoshone] Squaw, died of a putrid fever.”* She was a “good” woman, Luttig wrote, the “best” of the “Women in the fort.” Her age was “abt 25 years.” He did not mention her name.68

Was Sakakawea dead? Charbonneau had two Shoshone wives—Otter Woman, who had stayed behind with the Mandans and Hidatsas when Lewis and Clark proceeded west, and Sakakawea, who went with the Corps, assisted its members, and became a prominent figure in the American historical canon. Some scholars believe Sakakawea was indeed the woman Luttig mentioned who died in 1812. But others believe it was Otter Woman; Sakakawea, they claim, lived for years with the Comanches—close relatives of the Shoshones—and eventually died in 1884 among her own people on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming. Those favoring the 1812 date build their case exclusively from the written record, while those favoring the 1884 date draw on Native American oral traditions as well. In light of the uncertainties, it seems unlikely that even genetic testing could resolve the dispute.69