Rediscovering the Mandan’s Heart of the World

For decades, the Mandan people of the northern plains, whose vast and well-organized communities greeted French trappers and Lewis and Clark, were one of the first tribes described and illustrated in textbooks and histories of the West. Yet, as the story of Westward expansion, Manifest Destiny and the post-Civil War settlement of the West continued through and into the 20th and now the 21st century, the Mandan, and their affiliated tribes, Hidatsa and Arikara, become anecdotal to the ongoing