Report a correction
The Missouri River villages
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.
Factual errors are corrected without argument once documented. What you send is read by a person and checked against sources — nothing changes automatically. See the editorial policy.