Numakaki

Numakaki was a collective name for the Mandan, farmers on the upper Missouri in present-day North Dakota. Their villages of round earth lodges stood near the Heart and Knife rivers, and they exchanged surplus corn for bison meat.

In 1738 the Mandan carried trader La Vérendrye into one of their villages; an estimated nine fortified villages stood on the Heart River. A smallpox epidemic in 1781 forced villages to be abandoned, and by the early nineteenth century two remained. In 1837 another devastated the Mandan after an American Fur Company steamboat traveled up the Missouri.