Nueta

The Nueta, known to outsiders as the Mandan, are a settled Siouan-speaking people of the upper Missouri River in North Dakota. Nueta, meaning ourselves or our people, was originally the name of the villagers on the west bank; Mandan reached European records through the French explorer La Vérendrye in 1738.

They lived in permanent towns of circular earth lodges, grew corn, beans and squash, and traded their corn surplus for bison meat, horses and guns. The smallpox outbreak of 1781 cut their thirteen clans to seven and merged their towns into two villages, which the reduced Hidatsa joined for mutual defence.

The Lewis and Clark Expedition wintered beside them in 1804 and built Fort Mandan, where they met Sacagawea. In 1825 the Mandan accepted United States protection in the Atkinson-O'Fallon treaty, before another smallpox epidemic reached the upper Missouri in 1837.