e had been taken to the Mandan villages and
there sold to a Frenchman, known as Chaboneau, who kept her until she
reached womanhood and then married her. She was destined to play a
considerable part in the later work of the expedition, and to lend to
it one of its few elements of true romance.

The winter was passed busily, but for the most part quietly. The men
suffered no serious deprivation. Game was abundant; and one member of
the party, who was a good amateur blacksmith, set up a small forge,
where he turned out a variety of tools, implements, and trinkets, which
were traded to the Indians for corn. Everything went well. The officers
were as busy as the men, and their occupations were varied and vital.

They found difficulty in getting credit for the news they bore that the
government of the United States was to be thereafter in fact as well as
in name the controlling agency in administering the affairs of the
territory and in regulating trade. To make the Indian mind ready to
receive this lesson, it was first necessary to correct the evils bred
by the earlier short-sighted rule of the Spanish, and to uproot a
strong predisposition in favor of the British traders. The Hudson Bay
Company had been in existence since 1670, and the Northwest Company
since 1787; and they were not inclined to surrender their control of
trade without a struggle.

Aside from this task, the two youthful men-of-all-work were continually
engaged in gathering material for a report upon the ethnology of the
Upper Missouri and the plains. They have left to us a remarkably acute
and accurate monograph upon the subject, which shows that they were
even then alive to most of the questions likely to arise in the process
of reducing the land to order. The data thus collected were entered at
length in the journals; and a fair copy of these was made, for
transmittal to Washington in the spring. There were maps to be drawn,
too; and a mass of interesting objects was gathered to illustrate the
natural history of the route. This material had to be cleaned,
prepared, assorted and catalogued, and packed for shipment, to
accompany the report and illuminate its story, so that Mr. Jefferson
might have a full understanding of what had been accomplished during
the first year. The five months spent at Fort Mandan did not drag. The
best part of the winter's work lay in the attitude which was taken in
dealing with the Indians. In every particular of behavior, the