Old-Woman-Who-Never-Dies is the great agricultural goddess of the Mandan and Hidatsa villages of the upper Missouri and, after the creator pair, among the most important of the Mandan sacred beings. Maximilian, Prince of Wied, recorded in the 1830s that she was believed to live somewhere in the south and to make the crops grow, sending the migratory waterfowl north each spring as her tokens and representatives — the wild goose standing for the maize, the wild swan for the gourds, and the wild duck for the beans. At the spring corn-medicine feast of the women, scaffolds were hung with dried meat as offerings to her; old women representing the goddess carried ears of maize on sticks, and grains of the consecrated corn were mixed with the seed corn to fertilize it, while in autumn the departing birds were believed to carry the people's offerings back to her lodge in the south. The women's Goose Society, whose members were women in their middle years, danced in her honor at the arrival and departure of the waterfowl and for the good of the corn. Recent scholarship has traced her iconography and cult deep into the pre-contact archaeology of the region.