Indian Life on the Upper Missouri (Volume 89) (The Civilization of the American Indian Series)

The Plains Indian of the Upper Missouri in the nineteenth-century buffalo days remains the widely recognized symbol of primitive man par excellence–and the persistent image of the North American Indian at his most romantic. Fifteen cultural highlights, each a chapter made from research for a particular subject and enriched by contemporary illustrations, provide a sensitive interpretation of tribes such as the Blackfeet, the Crows, and the Mandans from the decades before Lewis and Clark up to the present.

In an attempt to understand and record the old culture of the Indians, the author has developed, over the past 30 years, a special ethnohistorical approach. The results, as seen here, are enlightening both for other ethnohistorians and for historians of more or less conventional bent. This book is abundantly illustrated from historical sources.

John C. Ewers (1909–1997), was the first curator of the Museum of the Plains Indian on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana. Later he served as Director of what is now Smithsonian Institution's National Museum  of American History and was Ethnologost Emeritus with the Smithsonian.  His many publications include The Blackfeet: Raiders on the Northwestern Plains and Plains Indian History and Culture: Essays on Continuity and Change.