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| Title | Sitting Rabbit's map |
| Date of Original | 1905 |
| Creator | Sitting Rabbit
|
| Creator Role | Artist |
| Description | This map layers history with the geography of 1905. To the left as you look at this digitized image is south where the map begins on the South Dakota/North Dakota border. The upper side of the map is the west bank of the Missouri River. The map is drawn in sections, so that Sitting Rabbit could stretch the curves of the river in a relatively straight line. He used both English and Mandan languages to identify specific locations.
This map includes villages that by 1905 were known only in the long memory of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara people. Many of these villages were abandoned as other tribes moved through or settled in the region. The Three Tribes, as they are known today, tended to move northward, settling into fairly large villages which offered more protection against enemies. Near the mouth of the Heart River the Mandan built 7 villages which around the year 1700 may have housed as many as 7, 000 people.
Sitting Rabbit included the modern cities of Mandan and Bismarck which can be identified by city street grids and railroad lines. Other landmarks overlap new and old features, such as ancient Mandan Town in the midst of the present-day Standing Rock Agency. |
| General Subject | Indians of North America
Maps, stamps and seals
|
| Subject (LCTGM) | Maps
Indian encampments
Rivers
|
| Location | North Dakota
|
| Decade | 1900-1909
|
| Format of Original | Maps
|
| Dimensions of Original | 23 ft. 4 in. x 17.5 in. |
| Relation | [Is Part Of] North Dakota History textbook materials |
| Biography/History | In 1905, Orin G. Libby, the acquisitive Secretary of the State Historical Society of North Dakota, asked a Mandan man by the name of Sitting Rabbit to draw a map of the "old villages of the Mandan and Gros Ventre [Hidatsa] . . . just as they used to be." Sitting Rabbit drew on the oral traditions of the Mandan and Hidatsa to draw the course of the Missouri River and its tributaries in relation to villages of the past and present. |
| Repository Institution | State Historical Society of North Dakota
|
| Repository Collection | State Historical Society of North Dakota Museum Collection
|
| Credit Line | State Historical Society of North Dakota |
| Language | English |
