Distant View of the Mandan Village. Plate 45. Catlin. The Manners, Customs and Condition of the North American Indians. London, 1892. Archives & Rare Books Department, University Libraries, University of Cincinnati.
Site of Fort Clark and the Mandan Village, Near Stanton, North Dakota. Alice M. Cornell. 1997
Sometime in mid-July, Catlin departed from Fort Union, heading downriver for St. Louis. He traveled by canoe with two French Canadians, Jean Batiste and Abraham Bogard, who appear in some of the Catlin’s images for this segment of his journey. Their principal stop was at Fort Clark and the Mandan Villages where Catlin made some of his most significant ethnographic observations. The Mandan and neighboring Hidatsa were semi-agricultural people who raised vegetables including corn, beans and squash, as well as hunted buffalo. They were traders themselves, bartering their agricultural products for materials produced by the migratory tribes of the Northern Plains, as well as brokering the trade of other tribes.
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