Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People
by Elizabeth A. Fenn
Summary
Elizabeth Fenn's Encounters at the Heart of the World tells the history of the Mandan, a Native nation that farmed and traded for centuries along the upper Missouri River in what is now North Dakota. The Mandan built large, permanent earth lodge villages, circular structures roughly forty feet across that housed extended families, and their settlements became a trading hub at the center of the continent, drawing goods from the Pacific Northwest, the Gulf Coast and the Atlantic seaboard in exchange for the corn, beans and squash their women grew along the riverbanks.
Fenn brings a historian's particular expertise in epidemic disease to this history, having built her earlier career studying the smallpox epidemic that swept North America between 1775 and 1782. That expertise informs her account of the two catastrophic smallpox outbreaks that struck the Mandan, one in 1781 that reduced their number of clans from thirteen to seven, and a far more devastating epidemic in 1837 and 1838 that killed roughly ninety percent of the population, leaving perhaps a hundred twenty five survivors from a nation that had numbered in the thousands.
Fenn draws on archaeology, climate records and Mandan oral tradition alongside written sources to build a history that treats a Native nation as the central subject rather than a people encountered along the way by explorers like Lewis and Clark. Reading the book means meeting the Mandan on their own terms, as builders of a sophisticated trading society, before meeting them again as survivors of a demographic catastrophe most American history treats only in passing.
Historical Context & Significance
Encounters at the Heart of the World won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for History, awarded the year after Hill and Wang published the book in March 2014. The 2015 finalists were Sven Beckert for Empire of Cotton and Nick Bunker for An Empire on the Edge.
Fenn, who holds the Walter S. and Lucienne Driskill Chair in Western American History at the University of Colorado Boulder, came to the university relatively late in an unconventional career that included eight years working as an auto mechanic in North Carolina before she returned to finish her doctorate at Yale. The book extended into Native American history the same close attention to epidemic disease that had shaped her earlier scholarship, and it remains a widely cited history of a nation whose story is more often told through the outsiders who encountered it than through its own long history on the northern Plains.