The Mandans probably are nothing more than an interesting tribe of Indians who, through long intermingling with the white race, have undergone considerable lightening of their original color.
A year after Catlin's visit his Mandan friends experienced a frightful calamity. A trading steamboat brought the small-pox to them, and, as happened in the case of many other tribes in the West, its ravages were fearful. Not being protected by vaccination, and knowing nothing { 328} of the treatment of the disease, the poor creatures died horribly. Not a few, in the height of their fever, threw themselves into the Missouri and so found a quicker and easier death. Nearly the whole tribe perished.
The remnant, along with that of their long-time friends and neighbors, the Minitarees, may be found to-day at Fort Berthold, in North Dakota.
[1] We may remember that La Salle and his followers found Indians on the plains of Texas crossing rivers in boats made of buffalo-hide.
The Origin of the American aborigines is treated briefly by Dr. John Fiske in "The Discovery of America," Chapter I, and at great length and with wide research by Mr. E. J. Payne in his "History of the New World Called America."
Their Distribution, also sketched by Dr. Fiske, is satisfactorily detailed by Dr. D. G. Brinton in his "Races and Peoples."
Those who may wish to study Indian Social Life in its primitive conditions will do well to read the work of Baron de Lahontan, recently edited by Dr. R. G. Thwaites. He was among the earliest writers on aboriginal affairs, and his "New Voyages to North America" gives the results of travel and observation about the years 1683-1701. "Three Years' Travels through North America," by Jonathan Carver, relates an interesting experience among the Indians between the years 1766 and 1768. Some of his general remarks, however, are drawn from the preceding writer. An inexhaustible store of information on this subject is found in the famous "Jesuit Relations," which have been edited, in an English translation, by Dr. Thwaites. For ordinary readers, however, the very interesting treatment by Dr. Fiske, in the chapter already cited, and especially by { 330} Mr. Francis Parkman, in the Introduction to his "The Jesuits in North America," will amply suffice.