Indian Tribes of the Upper Missouri: Edited with Notes and Biographical Sketch

In the 1850s, Edwin Thompson Denig completed what would become one of the most detailed ethnographic accounts ever written by a non-Native observer of the Upper Missouri tribes. But Denig was no ordinary outsider. For over two decades he lived among the Assiniboin, Sioux, Arikara, Mandan, Cree, and Crow as a fur trader, eventually marrying an Assiniboine woman and becoming embedded in communities he would document with uncommon intimacy. He supplied specimens to Audubon, information to Father De Smet, and linguistic data to Henry Schoolcraft, yet it is his own observations that prove invaluable: detailed portraits of customs, social structures, diplomatic relations, and daily life rendered by someone who spoke the languages and witnessed ceremonies now lost to history. The manuscript sat unpublished for seventy-six years before appearing in fragmentary form in 1930. This volume gathers his writings for the first time, preserving a rare window into cultures on the brink of transformation.