556 - Molander Indian Village State Historic Site
Like other stops on this Talking Trail, the Molander Indian Village isn’t immediately noticeable, unless you know what you are looking for–and where. Gazing out towards the horizon, you might notice the land dipping and rising, but, for the most part, the prairie seems insignificant, just another plot of land in Oliver County. A birds-eye view, however, would paint a different picture. From the air, the dipping and rising of the land appears more planned, more structured. The faint depressions, easily seen from above, mark the former locations of nearly forty earthlodge houses once inhabited by the Awaxawi (pronounced Ah-WAH-ha-WEE) people, one of three groups of Hidatsas.
“Awaxawi”means “village on the hill” and, according to Lewis and Clark, they occupied this village around 1764. The village was built overlooking the Missouri River, a vital resource for many tribes in North Dakota. Historically, Hidatsa territory stretched from the hills called Square Buttes, south of present-day Price, to the mouth of the Yellowstone River. Molander Village sits in the southern part of this territory and served as a summer village, occupied from spring through the fall. The Awaxawi people moved to the river bottoms for the winter, relying on the trees to provide firewood as well as shelter from the harsh winter winds.
The earth lodges at Molander Village measured forty to sixty feet in diameter and stood ten to fifteen foot high. Because it was common for extended families to live together, up to twenty people typically lived in each house. And like other settlements from this time, the village was protected by a dry moat or fortification ditch. A palisade stood on the inside edge of the ditch, as well as bastions that gave villagers a clear view and an open line of fire down the palisade walls in the case of an attack. However, there was one attack that the fortification couldn’t keep out.
The arrival of the Europeans meant the arrival of new diseases. The smallpox epidemic in 1781 and 1782 killed about half of the Awaxawi people. Sadly, this was only the first in a series of epidemics brought to the Mandan and Hidatsa people by Europeans. After 1782, the survivors moved north, to Amahami Village at the mouth of the Knife River.
Like many archaeological sites, the Molander Indian Village was named for one of its more recent landowners. In this case, for Gustav W. Molander, a Swedish immigrant who arrived in Oliver County in 1883 and purchased 160-acres of farmland that happened to include the village site; he sold that portion to the State of North Dakota in 1935. Today, depressions in the ground are all that is left of the Awaxawi village. The collapsed log cabin and stable near the eastern edge of the village has its own story, not related to the prehistoric site. The Civilian Conservation Corps are responsible for the kiosk at the entrance to the village and the fieldstone markers at the site. Close your eyes and picture the land before you, dozens of domed earth lodges, the smoke of hearth fires drifting from the top. It would be an amazing sight!