Quotes from Elizabeth A. Fenn

Pierre de la Vérendrye and his companions had encountered a people blessed with material abundance. "Corn, meat, fat, dressed robes, and bearskins" were all among their riches. "They are well supplied with these things," the Frenchman wrote. But his abbreviated journal barely mentions the villagers' equally rich ceremonial life.1

The waters that fed the Missouri had once flowed northeast into Hudson Bay, not south toward the Gulf of Mexico.