Bowers] HIDATSA SOCIAL AND CEREMONIAL ORGANIZATION 45 



should the smaller group move away and suffer severely from enemy 

 attacks, their leaders would lose face and those who followed them 

 would be ridiculed by their relatives who had wisely taken no part 

 in the separation. 



In this instance, the separation "worked." The group had the 

 protection of the U.S. Government. Buffaloes were numerous, so the 

 people lived well. In fact, there was an upstream migration of 

 individual families to join the group, which was an affront to the 

 leadership at Fishhook. More than that, the four "protectors of the 

 people" named did not prove to be wise selections; Sitting Elk murdered 

 Edge-of-Rock in a drunken brawl. This disposed of two members of 

 the group: Edge-of-Rock, who was dead, and Sitting Elk, who was 

 banished and taken in by the U.S. Army stationed at Fort Stevenson. 

 Of the other two members, Knife, the Long Arm impersonator of the 

 NaxpikE ceremony, moved to Fort Buford and joined the Bobtail 

 Bull group; Cherries-in-Mouth had family troubles and with no wives 

 to provide big feasts for his friends was no longer able to entertain 

 and people no longer sought his advice. 



This was the situation at the time that the Government was taking 

 over the social and economic life of the Hidatsa. The two groups 

 visited back and forth and assisted each other in the performance of 

 ceremonies. There was no thought of intergroup warfare and neither 

 group defended those who got into trouble at home. The relationship 

 between villages was essentially the same as existed a century earlier 

 while living in the three villages on the Knife River. There was a 

 general drift away from the formal public ceremonies at Fort Buford 

 while the other group continued about as before. In time, Crow- 

 Flies-High as military leader assumed the principal role as had Four 

 Bears a number of years earlier; Bobtail Bull, as village or peace 

 chief was not so frequently mentioned. At the present time, the 

 descendants of this group live largely in the Shell Creek section of the 

 reservation and are spoken of as the Crow-Flies-High band. They 

 still consider themselves to be a separate group which had its origin 

 several centuries earlier when they separated from the River Crow to 

 occupy the river section north of the mouth of the Knife River. 



Summer Camp 



The accounts given above have been devoted to the three original 

 village groups, the Hidatsa, the Awatixa, and the Awaxawi. These 

 were the summer village groups which were formerly further sub- 

 divided into winter groups until the pressure of enemies and reduced 

 numbers caused further integration so that the summer and village 

 populations were composed of the same households. The social, 

 ceremonial, and economic life of the summer village was more complex 



