Good Furred Robe

Good Furred Robe is the culture hero of the Mandan corn tradition. In the origin account recorded by Alfred Bowers, the Corn People came up from their home beneath the earth led by their chief Good Furred Robe, who was Corn Medicine and alone held the right to teach the people how to raise corn; he guided them northward along the Missouri to the Heart River, where they joined the Buffalo People and the country became the meeting place of all the Mandan. He instituted the corn ceremonies, among the most valued of early Mandan rites, and organized the Goose Women's Society, whose dances at the coming and going of the waterfowl served the corn goddess Old-Woman-Who-Never-Dies. He owned a robe which, sprinkled with water, would cause rain to come, and the office of corn priest descended from him into the twentieth century — Scattered Corn, who assisted the ethnographers of Mandan agriculture, was the daughter of the last Mandan corn priest. As late as 1948 the Mandan corn bundle was said to contain the skulls of Good Furred Robe and his brothers.

Domains

• corn and garden crops
• rain making
• ceremony and ritual

Powers

• to teach the people how to raise corn
• to bring rain when water was sprinkled on his robe
• to organize the Goose Society of the women

Relations

• sibling: Cornhusk Earrings
• sibling: Head for Rattle
• subordinate to: Old-Woman-Who-Never-Dies

Sources

• Alfred W. Bowers, Mandan Social and Ceremonial Organization, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950.
• Elizabeth A. Fenn, Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People, New York: Hill and Wang, 2014.
• Martha Warren Beckwith, Mandan-Hidatsa Myths and Ceremonies (Memoirs of the American Folklore Society, Vol. 32), New York: J. J. Augustin for the American Folklore Society, 1938.