The Missouri River villages
The trading hubs of the Plains, in solid earth lodges
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An earth lodge is a round building on a timber frame covered with turf and soil, warm in winter and cool in summer, built to stand for decades. The villages are necessary for understanding the Plains as something other than nomadic: they were fixed nodes in a trade network reaching the Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico. Lewis and Clark wintered with the Mandan in 1804–05. In 1837 smallpox arrived on a steamboat and killed an estimated nine in ten Mandan — one of the most sharply documented epidemics in American history, because the trading company's own books record the vessel, the date and the course of it.
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The Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara did not live in tents but in large round earth lodges in permanent villages along the Missouri. They grew maize, beans and squash, and the villages were meeting places where nomadic peoples from across the Plains came to trade.
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