It was not a good day for Cruzatte. When he retrieved his weapons he shot a buffalo cow in the thigh, breaking the bone, but she came after him anyway and he had to hide in a ravine.
Grizzly bears, it is worth noting, are Plains animals, feeding off the abundant game in the Plains. They were driven into the mountains when settlers moved into the Plains.
Cultural Exchange
On October 8 Lewis and Clark reached the Arikara villages. The Arikaras were agricultural, growing corn, beans, and squash, which they traded for horses. "All things were arranged for peace or war," Clark wrote when they arrived, but the tribe proved to be friendly. They went through the usual ceremonies, with speeches from both sides, the exchange of gifts, peace medals given out. The Indians of this tribe had never seen a black man before, and York, Clark's slave, fascinated them. "The Indians were much astonished at my black servant," wrote Clark, "who made himself more terrible in their view than I wished him to do, telling them that before I caught him he was wild and lived upon people. Young children was very good eating."
It was not uncommon for Indians to wet their fingers and try to rub the black off York's skin, thinking it was painted on.
The Arikaras must have heard about the expedition's treatment at the hands of the Teton Sioux and taken it to heart. The chiefs who spoke at the ceremonies all said that no one would "dare put hands on your rope" and try to stop them from going upriver. Lewis demonstrated his air gun, which operated on compressed air, and it astonished them.
But the Arikara had interesting things of their own to show. They fed the expedition a meal that included a large bean known as a ground bean. They collected the bean from the underground nests of meadow voles, which gathered them for the winter. The Arikara never took the beans without leaving other food behind for the voles.
They had stories to tell as well. Some miles above their villages stood stones "resembling human persons and one resembling a dog." The Arikara, reports Clark, "have a curious tradition about those stones. One was a man in love, one a girl whose parents would not let her marry him. The man, as is customary, went off to mourn, the female followed, and the dog went to mourn with them. All turned to stone gradually, commencing at the feet … They fed on grapes until they turned [i.e., turned to stone], and the woman has a bunch of grapes yet in her hand." Whenever they passed by these stones, says Clark, the Arikara stopped and left offerings.
Winter Sets In
They left the Arikara after a few days amongst them and continued moving upriver. On the 21st of October it snowed. They were entering the country of the Mandans, beyond which the Missouri was uncharted and where no white man had gone.
On the 24th they met one of the Mandan chiefs, who was out hunting with a group of men. Now, indeed, there were Mandans in view in every direction, all along the river banks, watching them approach, "continually in sight," satisfying, says Clark, their curiosity about the expedition. Two or three days later they reached the Mandan villages.
They were a fur-trading center for both the Hudson's Bay Company and the rival North West Company, and the Mandans were used to the presence of whites living with them. On the 31st of October, with snow deepening on the Plains and the river threatening to freeze up soon, Lewis and Clark decided to spend the winter there. They chose a site a mile or two below the first Mandan village, and on the 3rd of November, 1804 they began building Fort Mandan, their winter quarters.
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