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Updated: May 21, 2025
The officers were engaged, as at Fort Mandan the previous winter, bringing up their journals and copying them out, and in collecting data for a report upon the natural history, ethnology, and trade of the coast. All were living by chance. Sometimes they had plenty; at other times they were reduced to extremities.
When they started, the prairie was turning from brown to green and the rivers were still swollen from the spring thaw. In three weeks they reached a Mandan village on the upper Missouri and were well received. It was after midsummer when they set out again and pressed on westward with a trend to the south. The country was bare and desolate. For twenty days they saw no human being.
The Mandan tribe differed materially in its habits and customs from the Indians to the north, who supported themselves mainly, if not entirely, by hunting, who cared very little for agriculture, and moved continually like nomads over great stretches of country, living chiefly in tents or temporary villages.
With a view to the security of our inland frontiers, it has been thought expedient to establish strong posts at the mouth of Yellow Stone River and at the Mandan village on the Missouri, and at the mouth of St. Peters on the Mississippi, at no great distance from our northern boundaries.
Having found a good site for their winter camp, the explorers now built a number of huts, which they called Fort Mandan. The place was on the north bank of the Missouri River, in what is now McLean County, North Dakota, about sixteen hundred miles up the river from St. Louis, and seven or eight miles below the mouth of Big Knife River.
As near as I could figure it out afterward, he was doubtless correct. At noon the next day we reached the mouth of the Knife River, near which stood the Mandan village made famous by Lewis and Clark as their winter quarters. Fort Clark also stood here. Nothing remains of the Fort but the name and a few slight indentations in the ground.
A French flag in a leaden box with the arms of France inscribed was presented to the Mandan chief; and De la Vérendrye marched from the village on the 8th of December. Scarcely had he left, when he fell terribly ill; but for the pathfinder of the wilderness there is neither halt nor retreat.
In the early summer a number of strange Indians had arrived from the West at the Mandan villages. They were on horseback, and brought with them many additional horses to carry their provisions and supplies. They came in order to trade embroidered buffalo hides and other skins with the Mandans for corn and beans, which they did not grow in their own country.
"The interpreter, however, announced my arrival, and that same night many Ree, Gros Ventre, and Mandan warriors came to call upon me. Among them was a great chief of the Rees, called Poor Dog. "'You must be, said he to me, 'either a very young man, or a fool! You have not told us about your close escape, but a runner came in at dusk and told us of the pursuit.
It afforded a protected place for the villagers and a place of recreation for their children, as well as room for their drying-scaffolds, of which Mr. Cutler has introduced a number of the Minnetaree and Mandan model, and for gardens if they chose to use a part of the area for that purpose. They would also require room for a large accumulation of fuel for winter use.
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