This article is eighth in a series. The author is following the trail of the Lewis and Clark expedition across the North American West. Along the way, he's reporting on 200th-anniversary events at pivotal locations, and on what happened all those years ago.

It is a typical North Dakota winter and the temperatures have already dropped below zero many times. The lowest temperature ever recorded in North Dakota is 60° below zero Fahrenheit (minus 51° Celsius). It never got quite that cold for Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery, wintering near the Mandan villages on the Missouri River in the vicinity of present day Bismarck, but Clark did record a temperature of 43 below (minus 42° Celsius) on December 17, 1804. Nobody ventured outside that day.

The re-enactors from St. Charles, Missouri, whose progress we have been following in this series, packed up their uniforms and equipment, pulled their boats out of the water, and left for home early this November. We won't be hearing from them again until the spring.

Things slowed down for Lewis and Clark as well. Clark's journal entries get shorter, to the point where one day he says nothing except that the moisture in the air froze and fell as frost, and the frost crystals drifted into the hollows. Once in a while it warmed up, but for the most part it was bitterly, dangerously cold. Clark lined his cap and gloves with the fur of a lynx. Frostbite was common.

The Corps of Discovery tried to get as much hunting done as early in the season as possible. A party sent out in November and gone for over a week brought back 32 deer, 12 elk, and one buffalo. It took a great deal of game to feed so many men. They traded with the Mandans and Hidatsa in both goods and services for corn.

The Corps had a small forge with them, and two men, John Shields and Alexander Willard, who knew the craft of blacksmithing, repaired the iron tools and axes of the Indians in exchange for food.

Lewis credits Shields, indeed, with saving them that winter from having to endure periods of serious hunger, if not starvation. Lewis had so much regard for him that he asked Congress to give him a bonus for his work after the expedition returned home. Thereafter Shields made a living trapping game in Missouri with the elderly Daniel Boone, who was a relative.

The Indians visited Fort Mandan regularly after it was built. The Fort consisted of two rows of log huts set at an angle to each other, and an 18-foot-high (5.5-meter-high) balustrade surrounding them, all in the shape of a triangle.

The Indians had seen white men before, fur traders from the Hudson Bay and Northwest Companies out of Canada, and some of them had spent winters with them. But a whole company of white men like this was a real novelty, and they were fascinated. Shields could not work at his forge without Indians coming to sit and watch. If the whites were interested in Indian customs, the Indians were equally interested in white customs.

Indian Anecdotes

The Mandans were an especially agreeable people, and the Mandan chiefs liked to come visit the Fort and spend the night. Clark mentions again and again the "anecdotes" of Indian life that he heard, and you want to curse him out when he fails to write them down. That winter may have been tedious to the men of the expedition, but it isn't to us. The notes Clark took are one of the first accounts we have of Plains Indian life.

And we can watch in the notes as Clark becomes more sophisticated about the complicated relationships among the tribes of the High Plains. The Mandan villages themselves constituted a complex social structure. Not just Mandans lived there, but the Hidatsa as well, three villages of closely related but not identical bands along with the two villages of Mandans.

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