Winter at Fort Mandan

Many, including the expedition members, misheard the people’s name as ‘chien’—French for ‘dog’. Their name actually comes from the Sioux exonym shahíyena, perhaps meaning ‘people of alien speech’. The captains thought that they might make good trading partners.

Spelled variously in the expedition journals, Clark sometimes called the Arikara people Pawnee due to their similar linguistic origins—both were Caddoan-speaking people. Weakened by smallpox and Sioux attacks, they would have significant impact on American fur trade interests on the Upper Missouri and affect the lives of several expedition members.

The Arikara-resident trader and interpreter Gravelines proved to be so reliable and so good at the immediate tasks put to him that long after the Lewis and Clark Expedition he was employed by the United States government to represent its interests among the Arikara.

The Assiniboines were nomadic hunter-gatherers roaming primarily along the rivers in Saskatchewan and western Manitoba. They often dropped south into present-day Montana and North Dakota, especially in their role as middle-men between the English trading companies and the Hidatsas to the south.

After the 1781 smallpox epidemic, the Mandan had moved into to a more defensible position in two villages immediately south of the Hidatsa at the Knife River. The Mandan-Hidatsa alliance had developed many years prior, and the two tribes previously shared their large hunting territory to the west.

Prior to the expedition, the Hidatsa had settled in three villages just north of two Mandan villages in a complex now called the Knife River Villages. There, they practiced horticulture and hunting in the manner of the Plains Village tradition.

Presently known as the Lakota people, Lewis and Clark most often called them the Tetons. There were three main groups: Oglala, Brule, and Saone. The bands typically lived separately, hunted freely within each other’s territory, and came together for community events.

Iowa culture blended lifeways and customs of their neighbors: Horticulture and a well-defined, patrilineal class system was learned from the Sioux, a clan system was adapted from Algonquian-speaking neighbors, and like the Plains culture, they practiced the summer village method of hunting the American bison.

The Yankton along with the Yanktonai make up the Western Dakota division of the Dakota People. Although the Yankton and Yanktonai sometimes considered themselves to be one people, their separate locations resulted in a unique history for each.

Speaking Hidatsa and Shoshone, she was an interpreter beyond value yet never on the payroll. Still, Sacagawea remains the third most famous member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

Reaching the mouth of the Knife River on 27 October 1804, the expedition arrived in the midst of a major agricultural center and marketplace for a huge mid-continental region. The five permanent earth lodge communities there offered a panorama of contemporary Indian life.

Near the mouth of the Knife, in late October 1804, the expedition settled down for the winter. After the river ice broke up, the keelboat left for St. Louis and six new dugout canoes headed the opposite direction, up the Missouri river.

In January 1798, Thompson took celestial observations at the villages and determined them to be at a latitude of 47°17’22″N and a longitude of 101°14’24″W. Why then did Lewis and Clark think it necessary to take twenty-six observations?

Lewis attested that his men were “in excellent health and sperits, zealously attached to the enterprise, and anxious to proceed; not a whisper of murmur or discontent to be heard among them, but all act in unison, and with the most perfect harmony.”

“Late at night we were awaked by the sergeant on guard to see the beautiful phenomenon called the northern light….” What did Meriwether Lewis and William Clark understand about the aurora borealis? Scientific theories of their time may sound a bit fanciful today.

While wintering over at Fort Mandan, Clark made a series of maps based on Indian information and previous traders such as John Evans and François Larocque.