Each village had its own chief and sub-chiefs, all strung out along the Missouri and Knife Rivers within about six miles (about ten kilometers) of each other. The Hidatsa were also known as the Minitaris, the Shoe Indians, and the Gros Ventres, or Big Bellies, even though they did not have bigger bellies than any other tribe and another tribe further west was also known as the Big Bellies.

The five villages cooperated with each other and socialized with each other, but they were in many ways independent of each other, living together for mutual protection against their common enemy, the Sioux.

Relations among the different village chiefs were sensitive. Relations among the tribes in the area were even more so. When Lewis and Clark arrived the Mandans and the Arikara were at war, and the captains made a point of persuading an Arikara chief to come with them to the Mandans and arrange a peace between them.

Peace Pipe

They were trying to break the Arikara away from their dependence on the Sioux and isolate the latter tribe. So the chiefs smoked the peace pipe. The Mandan chief noted that the Arikara had started the war, but it was nothing to him. They "killed [the Arikara] like birds." He would desist if the Arikara would desist. In the end they agreed not to attack the other.

But the captains failed to see that, while the Sioux dominated the Arikara, they also needed them. The Sioux were a source of arms for the Arikara, which they obtained from the British, but they relied upon the Arikara, who were an agricultural people like the Mandans, for corn and horses in trade.

The two tribes were mutually dependent on each other, in other words, and had been for a long time. Within weeks this long-standing relationship re-established itself, and a small party of Sioux and Arikara warriors ambushed Mandan hunters out for buffalo and killed two men.

When Clark heard about this he showed up at one of the Mandan villages with his own troops, ready to join any retaliatory force in pursuing the Sioux war party. The Mandans, to his surprise, had no interest in doing so. It was winter, they pointed out. The snow was deep. The weather was exceedingly cold. The Sioux and Arikara had gone home. Many thanks for your offer of help, but maybe in the spring.

This was another aspect of Indian life it took Lewis and Clark a long time to understand. War was a way of life with these people, and it was seldom full-scale. Small raiding parties from each tribe would steal horses, and possibly kill a few men. The courage shown in these raids was what made men chiefs.

Not until much later, when settlers moved into the Plains on a large scale, did Indians stop fighting each other and unite to fight the white man.

Powerful "Medicine"

It is the little things, however, that make the time come alive. Lewis and Clark had to adjudicate between a Mandan husband and wife when the husband became jealous at the wife's involvement with one of the sergeants.

White men and Indian women had sexual relations that were usually instigated by Indian men, who believed that in sex the "medicine" of one person was somehow transmitted to the other. And the whites had powerful "medicine"—cannons, metal-working ability, mirrors, the blue beads Indians loved so much, scientific and musical instruments, superior rifles, the keelboat. The men hoped to acquire some of that medicine through their wives.

York with his black skin and his great size was a genuine phenomenon in their eyes, and he made much of it. When Lewis went to visit one particularly haughty chief he gravely informed Lewis that he was "not at home." Clark noted that the Mandans believed they had originated under the earth, in a kind of utopia full of gardens. Soon after they arrived at the Mandan villages a prairie fire swept over the area and two people died, but one boy saved himself when he hid under a "green" buffalo robe—one not yet tanned—and the fire swept over him and left him unharmed.

It is these little details that give the journals their charm.

Just a few days after Lewis and Clark arrived at the Mandans, a French trader named Toussaint Charbonneau came up to them and offered his services as a translator on the trip west. He had recently purchased two women who had been seized in a raid on the Shoshones in the Rocky Mountains, and made them his wives. They might be useful when they reached the Rockies.

When they left for the mountains the following April, accordingly, Lewis and Clark took Charbonneau and one of his wives with them. She was about 17 years old and had just given birth to a little boy named Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau. Her name was Sacagawea.

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