Smallpox on the Missouri: The Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara
By Daniel R. Whitlock
Length4h 13m
About this audiobook
Seen from the ridge, a Mandan town on the upper Missouri hardly looked like a town. Forty or fifty earth lodges, each roofed with a foot of packed soil, lay along the terrace like a herd of great animals resting in the wind, and below them women with hoes made from bison shoulder blades tended corn, beans, squash and sunflowers. For centuries the towns of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara had been a crossroads of the continent, where Crow horses, Assiniboine guns and St. Louis trade goods changed hands on the villagers' terms.
In June 1837 a fur-company steamboat, the St. Peter's, tied up at Fort Clark beside the Mandan town of Mih-tutta-hang-kusch. It carried smallpox. Before the fever burned out, the Mandan had lost perhaps nine of every ten people, among them their leader Mato-Tope, Four Bears, and the Hidatsa and Arikara had lost heavily too. The survivors' road ran through the Winter of the Dead to a shared town at Like-a-Fishhook, through the treaty years and the loss of the herds, and into the twentieth century as a single nation.
The fever came up the river that had made them rich. More than a century later the same river rose behind the Garrison Dam and drowned the bottomlands where most of their families lived. Both times, the three nations rebuilt on its banks.
Audiobook details
GenreHistory
Length4 hrs 13 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateSep 19, 2026
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Chapter 1: The Towns at the Confluence
2Chapter 2: Corn, Buffalo, and the Robe Trade
3Chapter 3: Mato-Tope and the Politics of Survival
4Chapter 4: The Steamboat and the Fever
5Chapter 5: Fort Clark, June 1837
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6Chapter 6: The Long Summer
7Chapter 7: Winter of the Dead
8Chapter 8: Like-a-Fishhook
9Chapter 9: The Treaty Years
10Chapter 10: The Vanishing Buffalo
11Chapter 11: The Garrison Dam
12Chapter 12: What Remains
13About the Author
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