66 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [BuLL. 185 
for a time with the Arikara while others went to the Hidatsa. 
Eventually they drew together in one smal] village above the site of 
that at Fort Clark, and the Fort Clark village was burned by a Da- 
kota war party in January 1839 (Abel, 1932, p. 181). 
For a few years following the smallpox epidemic we know little of 
the movements of the Hidatsa. There are hints that some were at 
Rock Village (82ME15) and at another village to the west and across 
the river, but the evidence is equivocal (Libby, 1908, p. 465). About 
1845 the Hidatsa, accompanied by a few Mandan (Wilson, 1934, p. 
351), settled at the Like-a-Fishhook bend of the Missouri River and 
built a village there which was named after that geographical fea- 
ture. Later the remainder of the Mandan joined them there, and 
Fort Berthold was established to handle the trade of the two tribes. 
The Arikara are relatively latecomers to the region. Precontact 
and early contact sites which are tentatively assigned to this tribal 
group are common in South Dakota to a point well below the present 
town of Chamberlain. When visited by Trudeau late in the 18th 
century, this tribe or a part of it, lived near the mouth of the Chey- 
enne River, but at about that time some of them seem to have mi- 
grated north and were living on the banks of the Missouri between 
the Heart and Knife Rivers. Lewis and Clark were shown village 
sites in that area which were ascribed to that tribe and which had 
not been long abandoned (Reid, 1947-48, pp. 86-89). In 1804 they 
had retreated downriver from this position and were living in three 
villages between the Grand and Cannonball Rivers when visited by 
Lewis and Clark. By 1823 they were concentrated in two adjacent 
villages above the mouth of Grand River, in South Dakota. In that 
year their attack on a party of traders brought on the Leavenworth 
campaign in which their double village was shelled. ‘They then aban- 
doned this site, and for the next few years the record of their move- 
ments is a confused one. Apparently some of them soon reoccupied 
the former village above the mouth of the Grand, while others went 
to Nebraska and joined their kinsmen, the Skidi Pawnee. In 1837, 
apparently again a united group, they moved north, and after the 
decimation of the Mandan by smallpox and the destruction of their 
village by the Dakota, the Arikara occupied the site and built a new 
village there. 
In 1861 the Arikara again moved upstream, abandoning the village 
at Fort Clark, and were invited to build their village beside the 
Mandan and Hidatsa. This invitation they declined and spent the 
winter of 1861-62 in two winter villages above the present settlement 
of Nishu (Libby, 1920, pp. 181, 191, 203). One of these, 832ML38, 
stood on what was at that time an island which, owing to stream 
shifting and silting of the old channel, has since become part of the 
left bank of the river (Will and Hecker, 1944, p. 84). In 1952 its 
