Sergeant Charles Floyd having died the evening of August 20, when at the site of Sioux City, the men were allowed to select a successor to him, and the choice, which was made by ballot, fell to Patrick Gass. This occurred on the 22d when the party was encamped at Elkpoint, and it may reasonably be assumed to be the first popular election in South Dakota. The next morning Captain Lewis killed a very large buffalo upon the bottom near Burbank, from which they salted two barrels of meat.
On the 24th they arrived at the mouth of the Vermilion River, and the captains took two men and went up nine miles to examine Spirit Mound, about which they had heard strange stories from the Indians, who believed that it was inhabited by a race of dwarfs, little people not larger than gophers, who instantly put to death any one who came near their home. It is needless to say that the explorers found nothing mysterious or alarming about the very ordinary mound upon the prairie. They did, however, find much that was pleasing to them. They say in their journal, "We saw none of these wicked little spirits, nor any place for them, except some small holes scattered over the top. We were happy enough to escape
It is noteworthy that Spirit Mound and other points along the Missouri in South Dakota then bore the names by which we still know them. This is one proof that the region was familiar to the French traders before Lewis and Clark came.
On August 27 Lewis and Clark came to the mouth of the James River and met some Yankton Sioux there, who informed them there was a large camp of the Sioux a few miles up the James. The captains, therefore, sent messengers to the Indians inviting them to a convenient point a few miles up the Missouri. They proceeded up the stream and made their camp on Green Island, on the Nebraska shore, near the site of Yankton. There they remained from Tuesday the 28th until Saturday, September 1, enjoying a grand council, powwow, and carousal with the Yanktons. They set up a tall flag pole over their camp and raised a beautiful American flag upon it. The days were occupied with feasting and speech-making, and the nights with feasting and dancing. The principal chiefs of the Yankton were Shake Hand—known to the French as the Liberator—White Crane, and Struck by the Pawnee.
One day a male child was born in one of the Indian lodges. Learning of this fact. Captain Lewis sent for the child and it was brought to him. He wrapped it in the American flag and made a speech in which he prophesied that the boy would live to become eminent among his people and a great friend of the white men. His prophecy came true, for the boy grew up to be the famous Struck by the Ree, chief of the Yankton tribe, who was probably the means of saving the entire settlement at Yankton from massacre in the War of the Outbreak in 1863. All his life Struck by the Ree took great pride in his Americanism, and in the fact that he was first dressed in an American flag.
On the 1st of September the party again embarked and proceeded up the stream. The next day they stopped to explore the embankment at Bon Homme Island, which they believed to be a prehistoric fort, but which has since been shown to have been but a bank of sand thrown up by the winds and floods. On the 8th they passed the Pawnee or Trudeau House which was established in 1797, and there was no other event of note for several days.
While Lewis and Clark were at the Vermilion River, their two horses had strayed away, and George Shannon, the youngest man in the party, had been sent out to hunt them up. Sixteen days had since elapsed, during part of which the captains had enjoyed their council and carousal with the Yanktons, and no word of the boy had come to them. They admit, in their journal, that they were becoming uneasy about him. Shannon had found the horses and set off up the river. During the first four days he used all his bullets and then he nearly starved, being obliged to subsist for twelve days on a few grapes and a rabbit, which he killed by making use of a hard piece of stick for a bullet. One of the horses gave out and was left behind; the other he kept as a last resource for food. Despairing of overtaking the party, he was returning down the river in hopes of meeting some other boat, and was on the point of killing his horse when he was so fortunate as to meet his friends, on the 11th of September.
The party now made their way up the stream, meeting no Indians, until the night of the 21st, when they were camped on the north side of the Big Bend, having almost completed its circuit. Between one and two o'clock in the morning they were alarmed by the sergeant on guard, who cried out that the sand bar upon which the party were camped was sinking. They sprang to the boats and pushed over to the opposite shore, but before they had reached it, the ground upon which their former camp had been had entirely disappeared under the waters. The next day they passed the Loisel post on Cedar Island, which they describe as being sixty or seventy feet square, built of red cedar, and picketed in with the same material; and on the 24th they arrived at the Teton River, where, as we shall see in the next chapter, they were to remain several days.
LEWIS AND CLARK WITH THE TETON
CHAPTER VII
LEWIS AND CLARK WITH THE TETONS
All along the way Lewis and Clark took celestial observations to ascertain the latitude and longitude. They also kept a record of the temperature, with a mercury thermometer made for them in St. Louis by a French physician and scientist named Dr. Sauguin. They fell in with the doctor when they arrived at St. Louis; and he gave them much valuable information and assistance and told them how important it was that they should have a thermometer. The good captains had not the slightest idea what a thermometer was, but the little doctor hurried about to find the materials out of which to make the instrument. Not in the Mississippi valley could he find the glass or the quicksilver, till finally he bethought himself of his wife's French plate-glass mirror, and, in spite of her protest, he scraped the quicksilver from the back of it, melted up the mirror, and made from it the stem of the thermometer, into which he poured the quicksilver he had scraped from the looking-glass. This was soon properly graduated, or scaled to degrees of heat and cold, and, judging by what we now know of the temperatures of the Missouri valley, was reasonably accurate. From such circumstances as the foregoing the student will understand how primitive was the outfit of the explorers.
When Lewis and Clark arrived at the Teton or Bad River, near where the village of Fort Pierre is now located, they found there a delegation of Indians, about fifty or sixty in number, who represented a large camp some two or three miles up the Teton River. These Indians were Minneconjou Tetons, a branch of the Sioux, under the
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