Bowers] HID ATS A SOCIAL AND CEREMONIAL ORGANIZATION 393 



Hidatsa had moved northward to the mouth of Knife River and sub- 

 sequent to the removal of Old-Woman-Who-Never-Dies to her per- 

 manent home in the south. Traditionally, then, the order of adoption 

 of the various formal Wolf ceremonies was: (1) Sunrise Wolf; (2) 

 Sunset Wolf; (3) Wolf Woman. 



The Wolf rites are distinctive in that their principal emphasis was 

 on warfare and their ritual training consisted primarily of teaching 

 the formal offensive warfare patterns. Offensive warfare with the 

 Hidatsa was a highly ritualistic activity in which the participants, 

 irrespective of the sacred bundles carried by the leaders, impersonated 

 the wolves and coyotes. The leaders themselves were known as the 

 Old Wolves, the scouts were the Coyotes, and the other members of 

 the party were Young Wolves. The great florescence of rites empha- 

 sizing warfare was traditionally of recent occurrence. The elements 

 comprising these rites, however, were plucked from the long-standing 

 cultural traditions and seemingly do not represent many featm-es new 

 to the Hidatsa groups. The ritual attitude toward the wolf is not 

 unhke that of the Mandan, who had gone even farther than the 

 Hidatsa in the development of hereditary bundle rites, or the Crow, 

 Sioux, Cheyenne, and their other neighbors; but the form taken was 

 quite different. Mandan Wolf rites were intimately integrated into 

 both the ceremonial and clan systems while we find no evidence that 

 Hidatsa Wolf rites followed any particular clan pattern. 



In the Mandan sacred myths, Clay-on-the-Face, a wolf imperson- 

 ator, regretted that only the moiety representing the buffaloes and 

 founded by Lone Man had a leader, and he pledged that, should the 

 war expedition which he was planning return successfully, he would 

 give names to the people of the opposite moiety. So, when he met 

 the enemy and overcame them in battle, he thought of his vow. As 

 he returned toward the village he observed the prairie chickens, the 

 speckled eagles, the bears, the badgers, the snakes living in the red 

 hills, the crows, and the people in a clump of woods, so he gave these 

 names to the people of the opposite moiety as clan names, designating 

 those of the numerically superior Prairie Chicken clan to be the 

 "carriers" of the Wolf rites. The clan inheritance feature was pre- 

 served by transmission from "mother's brother to sister's son" or 

 "father-in-law to son-in-law" inheritance, both being aspects of clan 

 inheritance. These Mandan beliefs and practices were entirely 

 lacking with the Hidatsa. Transmission was from father to son, 

 thus cutting across clan lines, and Wolf Woman rites were transferred 

 from a female to one she addressed as "daughter" — father's sister to 

 brother's daughter, or mother to daughter. 



