548 - Huff Indian Village

Elizabeth Fenn in her Pulitzer Prize winning book, Encounters at the Heart of the World, points out just how expansive the reach of the Mandan commerce was, with the 1960 discovery of a little marine mollusk. She points out how the shell was “favored as a medium of exchange amongst the peoples who lived in the Pacific Northwest.” And while the shell in and of itself might not be all that impressive, what is notable is the journey it took to arrive to the point at which you are standing now.

In fact, “investigators at sites on the northern plains have unearthed items traceable not just to the Pacific Northwest but also to Florida, the Tennessee River, the Gulf Coast, and the Atlantic Seaboard.” While items like shells, beads, ceramics, and jewelry likely don’t adequately represent the type of trade that would have taken place on a more regular basis, because those perishable goods have since disappeared, we are nonetheless fortunate that those beads, shells, and jewelry neither rot nor pleased the palettes of scavengers passing by—for it is those trinkets that offer us insight into the scope of the trades and the hands that made the exchanges all those years ago.

While it might be fun to imagine that the commerce and size of the community that occupied the huff village as a sign of peaceful times, it is of course, not the case. Instead, the size of the community that resided here offers insight to the opposite—violence and constant assaults were likely, and while trades took place frequently, so too, did raids.