Tuesday, May 7, 2024

Dakota Sioux Hopewell Giant's Graveyard Discovered in Mandan North Dakota

 Dakota Sioux Hopewell Giant's Graveyard Discovered in Mandan North Dakota




Scientific American, 1883

A Tradition of Giants,”
Two miles from Mandan, on the bluffs near the junction of the Hart and Missouri rivers is an old cemetery of fully 100 acres in extent filled with bones of a giant race. This vast city of the dead lies just east of Fort Lincoln Road. The ground has the appearance of having been filled trenches piled full of dead bodies, both man and beast, and covered with several feet of earth. In many places mounds from 8 to 10 feet high, and some of them 100 feet or more in length have been filled with bones and broken pottery, vases of various bright-colored flints and agates. The pottery is of a dark material, beautifully decorated, delicate in finish and as light as wood, showing the work of a people skilled in the arts and possessed of a high state of civilization. This has evidently been a grand battlefield, where thousands of men and horses have fallen. Nothing like a systematic or intelligent exploration has been made, as only little holes two or three feet in depth have been dug in some of the mounds, but many of the bones of man and beast and beautiful specimens of broken pottery and other curiosities have been found in those feeble efforts at excavation. We asked an aged Indian what his people knew of these ancient graveyards. He answered: “Me know nothing about them. They were here before the red man."