text: Hjalmar Holand has proposed that interbreeding with Norse survivors might explain the "blond" Indians among the Mandan on the Upper Missouri River. In a multidisciplinary study of the Kensington Runestone, anthropologist Alice Beck Kehoe dismissed, as "tangential" to the Runestone issue this and other historical references suggesting pre-Columbian contacts with 'outsiders', such as the Hochunk (Winnebago) story about an ancestral hero "Red Horn" and his encounter with "red-haired giants". Archaeologist Ken Feder has stated that none of the material evidence that would be expected from a Viking presence in and travel through the American Midwest exists.
  Intertribal warfare 1785-1845
  Sioux Indians attacked the Mandan village Nuptadi and set it on fire around 1785. The "turtles" used in the Okipa ceremony were saved. "When Nuptadi Village was burned by the Sioux ...", recounted Mandan woman Scattercorn, "... the turtles produced water which protected them ...".
  The Sioux kept consolidating their dominant position on the northern plains. In the words of "Cheyenne warrior" and Lakota-allied George Bent: "... the Sioux moved to the Missouri and began raiding these two tribes, until at last the Mandans and Rees [Arikaras] hardly dared go into the plains to hunt buffalo".
  The Arikara Indians were from time to time also among the foes of the Mandans. Chief Four Bears's revenge on the Arikara, who had killed his brother, is legendary.
  The Mandan maintained the stockade around Mitutanka Village when threats were present.
  Major fights were fought. "We destroyed fifty tepees [of Sioux]. The following summer thirty men in a war party were killed", tells the Mandan winter count of Butterfly for 1835–1836. The big war party was neutralized by Yanktonai Sioux Indians.