h canoe loads of furs for
St. Louis. These men foregathered with the _voyageurs_ and told only too
true stories of the dangers ahead. Fires kindled on the banks of the
river called neighboring Indians to council. Council Bluffs commemorates
one conference, of which there were many with Iowas and Omahas and
Ricarees and Sioux. Pause was made on the south side of the Missouri to
visit the high mound where Blackbird, chief of the Omahas, was buried
astride his war horse that his spirit might forever watch the French
_voyageurs_ passing up and down the river.

[Illustration: Captain William Clark.]

By October the explorers were sixteen hundred miles north of St. Louis,
at the Mandan villages near where Bismarck stands to-day. The Mandans
welcomed the white men; but the neighboring tribes of Ricarees were
insolent. "Had I these white warriors on the upper plains," boasted a
chief to Charles Mackenzie, one of the Northwest Fur Company men from
Canada, "my young men on horseback would finish them as they would so
many wolves; for there are only two sensible men among them, the worker
of iron [blacksmith] and the mender of guns." Four Canadian traders had
already been massacred by this chief. Captain Lewis knew that his
company must winter on the east side of the mountains, and there were a
dozen traders--Hudson Bay and Nor'westers--on the ground practising all
the unscrupulous tricks of rivals, Nor'westers driving off Hudson Bay
horses, Hudson Bay men driving off Nor'-westers', to defeat trade; so
Captain Lewis at once had a fort constructed. It was triangular in
shape, the two converging walls consisting of barracks with a loopholed
bastion at the apex, the base being a high wall of strong pickets where
sentry kept constant guard. Hitherto Captain Lewis had been able to
secure the services of French trappers as interpreters with the Indians;
but the next year he was going where there were no trappers; and now he
luckily engaged an old Nor'wester, Chaboneau, whose Indian wife,
Sacajawea, was a captive from the Snake tribe of the Rockies.[1] On
Christmas morning, the stars and stripes were hoisted above Fort Mandan;
and all that night the men danced hilariously. On New Years of 1805, the
white men visited the Mandan lodges, and one _voyageur_ danced "on his
head" to the uproarious applause of the savages. All winter the men
joined in the buffalo hunts, laying up store of pemmican. In February,
work was begun on