Hidatsa Scalp Dance

Description

In late November of 1833 Maximilian and Bodmer made a cold, tiring, nine-hour trek from Fort Clark to one of the Hidatsa winter villages to observe a ceremony. They stayed for several days, and this sketch may have been done at that time. Composed of about eighty households, the village is most probably Eláh-sa, the largest of the Hidatsa settlements on the Knife River. Maximilian remarked on the dense arrangement of lodges in the winter villages, where the dwellings were of necessity packed closely together amid the thick, sheltering timber. A similar but more detailed scene appears as Tableau 26 in the aquatint atlas.