These people, who spoke a now-extinct Siouan language, called their North Dakota homeland near the center of the North American continent the “heart of the world.” For 10 points each:
[10h] Name these Native American people, the subject of a 2014 Pulitzer-Prize-winning book by Elizabeth Fenn. The Lewis and Clark Expedition built a fort named for these people in the winter of 1804.
ANSWER: Mandan people [or Numakiki; accept Fort Mandan]
[10e] This Shoshone interpreter and her husband Toussaint Charbonneau joined the Lewis and Clark Expedition at Fort Mandan.
ANSWER: Sacagawea [or Sacajawea; or Sagagawea; or Sakakawea]
[10m] The Mandan allied with the Hidatsa and Arikara Nations after one of these events decimated the Great Plains in 1837. An earlier attempt to start one of these events was made at the Siege of Fort Pitt.
ANSWER: smallpox epidemics [accept equivalents such as smallpox outbreaks; prompt on epidemics or outbreaks by asking “of what disease?”]
<Editors, American History>