A half-century of conflict. France and England in North America. Part ...

221739.] THE MANDANS. 17caught. This was probably suggested by the armorof the Spaniards, who had more than once madeincursions as far as the lower Missouri ;but the narratorsdrew on their imagination for various additionalparticulars.The Mandans seem to have much declined in numbersduring the century that followed this visit ofLa V^rendrye. He says that they had six villageson or near the Missouri, of which the one seen byhim was thesmallest, though he thinks that it containeda hundred and thirty houses.^ As each ofthese large structures held a number of families, thepopulation must have been considerable. Yet whenPrince Maximilian visited the Mandans in 1833, hefound only two villages, containing jointly two hundredand forty warriors and a total population ofabout a thousand souls. Without having seen thestatements of La Vdrendrye, he speaks of the populationas greatly reduced by wars and the small-pox,— a disease which a few years later nearly exterminatedthe tribe.1 Journal de La Verendrye, 1738, 1739. This journal, which is illwrittenand sometimes obscure, is printed in Brymner, Report onCanadian Archives, 1889.2 Le Prince Maximilian de Wied-Neuwied, Voyage dans I'lnUrieurde I'Amerique du Nord, ii. 371, 372 (Paris, 1843). When CaptainsLewis and Clark visited the Mandans in 1804, they found them intwo villages, with about three hundred and fifty warriors. Theyreport that, about forty years before, they lived in nine villages,the ruins of which the explorers saw about eighty miles below thetwo villages then occupied by the tribe. The Mandans had movedup the river in consequence of the persecutions of the Sioux andVOL. II. —