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three remained of ten bands that flourished before the ravages of smallpox and the Sioux. Then the expedition pushed off again - Lewis was eager to reach the Mandan Indians before the winter cold set in. To their satisfaction, their talk about peace had already borne fruit: An Arikara chief traveled with them as an ambassador of goodwill to the Mandans, with whom the Arikaras were then at war.
    On October 14, they stopped on a sand bar for unpleasant duty. The day before, Private John Newman had been court-martialed for insubordination and was given seventy-five lashes. Lewis also separated Newman from the Army and sentenced him to be sent back downriver with the returning party in the spring. It was a difficult decision. Newman begged to be allowed to remain with the expedition, and he worked especially hard during the winter to earn forgiveness. But Lewis felt he must remain firm and dispatched both Newman and Private Moses Reed, the deserter, to St. Louis the next year.
    The weather grew colder. Several men came down with rheumatism. Clark was immobilized by violent neck spasms until Lewis “applied a hot Stone [wrapped] in flannel, which gave me some temporey ease.”
    On October 24, a few flakes of snow floated down in the morning, and that day they met their first Mandans, a hunting party led by one of the principal chiefs. Sixty-six years earlier, the French explorer La Vérendrye, the first European to visit them, found the Mandans living in nine villages sixty miles down the river - near where Bismarck, North Dakota, now stands. But smallpox had wiped out most of them, and marauding Sioux tribes had driven the survivors farther up the Missouri.
    On October 27, the expedition reached the two remaining Mandan villages. Nearby, there were three villages of Minnetaree Indians, a tribe the French called Gros Ventres, meaning “Big Bellies.” Like the Arikaras, both the Mandans and Minnetarees lived in round, earth-covered lodges and were farming peoples. From living close to Canada, they had grown accustomed to trading with Europeans.
    For their winter camp, the captains chose a wooded place three miles downriver from the Mandan’s lower village. On November 3, the men began building cabins for their fort. The next day, Clark noted in his journal that “a Mr. Chaubonie, interpreter for the Gross Ventre nation Came to See us . . . this man wished to hire as an interpiter.” The expedition would see much more of this man, Toussaint Charbonneau.
    Part native and part European, Charbonneau was born in Boucherville, a fur-trading community near present-day Montreal, Quebec. He had worked as a fur trapper for Great Britain’s North West Company – service that likely ended dishonorably in 1795. A Scottish politician named John MacDonell, who joined the North West Company on expeditions, recorded an incident on May 30, 1795, in which Charbonneau “was stabbed . . . in the act of committing a Rape upon her Daughter by an old Saultier (Salteaux, a tribe settled around Lake Superior in Canada) woman with a Canoe Awl – a fate he highly deserved for his brutality.”
    Lewis and Clark were impressed that Charbonneau could speak French and Sioux. He had been living with the Minnetarees for about five years and spoke their difficult language well. But the captains were even more intrigued by Charbonneau’s two young wives. They were Shoshone girls who had been captured by a Minnetaree war party in the foothills of the Rockies.
    Lewis and Clark knew they would need the help of the Shoshone tribes at the headwaters of the Missouri River, and Charbonneau’s wives could act as interpreters and diplomats. Charbonneau told the captains that the Shoshone had a large herd of horses, which they would need to cross the western mountains. A week after Lewis and Clark met Charbonneau, he and his wives joined the expedition.
    After two weeks laboring in the cottonwood groves, the party moved into the completed cabins on November 20. Two