The huts were ranged in two rows, each row containing four rooms, fourteen feet square, and seven feet high. The place in which they were erected was called _Fort Mandan_, and was a point of low ground, on the north side of the Missouri, covered with tall and heavy cotton-wood. The computed distance from the mouth of the Missouri was sixteen hundred miles.
In the vicinity of this place were five villages of three distinct nations: _Mandans_, _Ahanaways_, and _Minnetarees_. Not many years ago the Mandans were a very numerous race, occupying, in the whole, eighteen villages; but their numbers had been so much reduced, by the small-pox and by their wars with the Sioux, that they were compelled to emigrate in a body, and unite themselves with the Ricara nation; and they now occupy only two villages, on opposite sides of the Missouri, and about three miles asunder. Each of these contains forty or fifty lodges, built in the same manner as those of the Ricaras. The whole force of the Ahanaways is not, at present, more than fifty men. Their residence is on an elevated plain, near the mouth of the _Knife river_. On the south side of the same river, and about half a mile distant from this people, is a village of the _Minnetarees_; and there are four other villages of these Indians at a little distance.
The religion of the Mandans consists in the belief that one great Spirit presides over their destinies; but they also believe that various beings, some imaginary and some existing in the form of animals, have the power of interceding for them with the great spirit. To these they pay their devotion. They believe in a future state; and that, after death, they shall go to the original seats of their forefathers, which they suppose to be underground, immediately beneath a spot on the banks of the Missouri, where they formerly had nine villages.
On the 7th of December, the Missouri was frozen over, and the ice was an inch and half in thickness. The cold was so intense, that the air was filled with icy particles resembling a fog; and the snow was several inches deep. Notwithstanding this, one of the commanders, accompanied by some of the men, went out almost every day to hunt. On the tenth, Captain Clarke and his hunters, after having killed nine buffaloes, were obliged to spend a wretched night on the snow: having no other covering than a small blanket and the hides of the buffaloes they had killed. The next day the wind blew from the north; and the ice in the atmosphere was so thick, as to render the weather hazy, and to give the appearance of two suns reflecting each other. On the seventeenth, the mercury in the thermometer fell to seventy-four degrees below the freezing point. The fort was completed on the day before Christmas.