Timeline & Map PDF  720 KB

"Proceeded early on our voyage, passed high bluffs on the south and burnt prairie on the north.  at 3 mes passed the place where Trodow* wintered one winter 1796.  Called the Pania house.  Encamped on an island (Boat Island) covered with timber; and having a number of buffaloe on it."   Clark

Trodow*  - Jean Baptiste Truteau came to St. Louis from Canada in 1774 and served as schoolmaster there for over half a century.  In 1795 he stated that he had been making trips into the Indian country for twenty-six years.  He could converse in the languages of several of the river tribes.  In 1794 he headed the expedition of the Company of Explorers of the Upper Missouri in an attempt to reach the Mandan villages, having been appointed to the position by the Spanish lieutenant-governor, Zenon Trudeau, with whom his name has been confused.  One would assume that the captains consulted him while in St. Louis, but records do not indicate this.  Lewis and Clark apparently had portions of his journal of that trip with them.  The Sioux blocked Truteau from reaching the Mandans, so he wintered at the post mentioned here.  Clark's "Pania House" (or "Pawnee House") is more accurately named "Ponca House," being in the neighborhood of that tribe.  It was located some thirty-four miles above the mouth of the Niobrara, in Charles Mix County, South Dakota.  Truteau evidently wintered there in 1794 - 95, so Clark may have been in error in writing "96."

"I saw at one view near the river at least 500 Buffalow, those animals have been in View all day feeding in the Plains.  York killed a buffalow near the Boat by the derections of the master, Capt. Lewis wint out with R Fields & each killed a buffalow"   Clark

"The river is shallow during this day’s course, and is falling a little  on a hill we found the back bone of a fish*, 45 feet long tapering to the tale, some teeth, those joints were seperated and all peterfied, opposit this island 1/12 miles from the river is a large Salt Spring of remarkable Sale water.    Elk & buffaloe are in great abundance."   Clark

fish*- Plesiosaur, an aquatic dinosaur of the Mesozoic era.  Some of the vertebra apparently are now in the Smithsonian Institution.

September 11, 1804 ( Camped just above the mouth of Landing Creek, Gregory County, South Dakota)

"The man who left us 22 days ago, George Shannon joined us, nearly starved to death. He had been twelve days without anything to eat but grapes and one rabbit.  This man supposeing the boat to be a head pushed on as long as he could, when he became weak and fiable deturmined to lay by and waite for a tradeing boat, which is expected Keeping one horse for the last resorse, thus a man had like to have starved to death in a land of Plenty for the want of bulletes or something to kill his meat." Clark