Biesterfeldt: A Post-Contact Coalescent Site on the Northeastern Plains

Abstract

Biesterfeldt is a fortified village of about sixty earth lodges on the Sheyenne River in eastern North Dakota. A large central earth lodge faces a central plaza, with dwellings randomly set elsewhere in the village. The site setting, village plan, and structures are like those of historic Mandan and Arikara villages. Pottery attributes are well within the range of sedentary Missouri River groups, and only a few elements distinguish Biesterfeldt pottery from that of the Arikara. The site is dated about 1750 to 1790, when trade goods had displaced many native tools of bone and stone. In the thirty years since W. D. Strong dug the site, new data have accumulated which require revisions in the interpretation of the Biesterfeldt component: the artifact complex conforms to that of Post-Contact Coalescent sites of the Plains Village pattern in the Missouri River trench to the west.<br/>The identification of Biesterfeldt as Cheyenne is based on circumstantial evidence; its occupants are uncertain, but the Cheyenne provide the most economical hypothesis. The Cheyenne migration from the Minnesota area was by individual groups, not as a tribal body. Sedentary villages on the Minnesota River and on the Missouri were coeval with the village (or villages) on the Sheyenne River. The latter river valley was occupied after 1700, perhaps by 1724, and was abandoned about 1790.<br/>Present data suggest the Sheyenne-James region was a marginal one in the Northeastern Plains sub-area. It was not occupied by groups moving from the Missouri valley; rather, horticultural groups in the Northeastern Plains may have been subjected to cultural processes analogous to those which were responsible for the development of the Coalescent tradition in the Missouri valley. Thus, they participated in the development of the Plains Village pattern in an area well removed from the Missouri River, where the Coalescent tradition reached its fullest expression.<br/>The Missouri River was crossed by some Cheyenne in the 1600s, and the last of them abandoned it about 1840, providing about two centuries for the tribe as a whole to abandon a settled horticultural way of life. A review of purported Cheyenne sites along the Missouri River reveals that none of them are clearly identifiable as such. Only three of these village locations are not now flooded by the Oahe Reservoir: one of them is near the Heart River, and two are on the Grand River. The Cheyenne movement onto the High Plains was motivated by settling an area advantageous for trade purposes, rich in bison, and temporarily removed from military pressure by the Dakota.