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rows of four cabins - each fourteen feet square - were built at right angles to form two sides of a triangle, and a palisade of posts joined the open base, with two storerooms filling in its apex. This structure, named Fort Mandan, flew the American flag that winter of 1804-05 as the westernmost military outpost of the United States. Lewis and Clark determined that they had traveled 1,600 miles since leaving the Mississippi.
    It was a busy winter. A surprising amount of traffic passed through and around the Mandan villages. Pawnee and Cheyenne Indians visited from the south; Arikaras arrived from downriver; Assiniboins came from the north.
    The weather was colder than anyone in the party had ever experienced. In mid-December, the thermometer plunged to forty-five degrees below zero. The next day was thirty-two degrees below zero at sunrise; Clark noted: “Sent out 7 men to hunt for the Buffalow they found the weather too cold & returned.”
    At Christmas, the men had a celebration, but the Indians, as Sergeant Ordway detailed in his diary, were excluded: “We fired the Swivels at day break & each man fired one round, our officers Gave the party a drink of Taffe [rum], we had the Best to eat that could be had, & continued firing dancing & frolicking dureing the whole day. The Savages did not Trouble us as we had requested them not to come as it was a great medician day with us.”
    New Year’s Day was a different story. Lewis and Clark permitted sixteen men to visit the nearest Mandan village in the morning, carrying “a fiddle & a Tambereen & a Sounden horn.” Clark walked to the village later, noting that the Indians were “much pleased at the Danceing of our men.” The captain ordered his servant, York, to dance, “which amused the Croud Verry much, and Somewhat astonished them, that So large a man should be active &c.”
    But the holidays were only brief interludes. Hunters went out daily as the weather permitted. The captains carefully questioned Indians and traders about the tribes, their customs, where they might be found, and especially about the topographical features of the country ahead of them.
    As the only people with medical knowledge, the two officers also kept busy treating their men and the Indians who came to them for help. It was not simply ointments and tonics. “I bleed the man with the Plurisy to day & Swet him,” Clark noted one day. “Capt. Lewis took off the Toes of one foot of the Boy who got frost bit Some time ago.”
    Lewis also was called to help in a case he knew nothing about. On February 11, the younger of Toussaint Charbonneau’s wives, sixteen-year-old Sacagawea, was in labor with her first child. Lewis’s brief medical training had not prepared him for this. When a trader mentioned that a rattlesnake’s rattle never failed in such cases, Lewis found one among his specimens and gave it to him. Crumbling it into a cup of water, the trader gave it to Sacagawea - and shortly afterward, she gave birth to a healthy boy.
    Sacagawea’s name was roughly translated as “bird woman.” Clark called her “Janey,” and her son, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, was given the nickname “Pompy,” or “Little Pomp.” In the Shoshone language, “pomp” meant “first-born.”
    The captain was fond of the child and his “little dancing boy” antics. Clark saw the presence of Sacagawea and her child as an indication of peace, signaling the expedition’s “friendly intentions, as no woman ever accompanies a war party of Indians in this quarter.”
    On April 7, 1805, the expedition left its camp in the two pirogues and six canoes. Enlistments from the return party replaced Floyd and the two court-martialed men, and Charbonneau and his family had been added. The expedition numbered thirty-three, including Sacagawea’s two-month-old baby.
    That day, the return party departed in the keelboat, carrying nine boxes of scientific specimens for President Jefferson, including a live prairie dog and