72 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [BuLL. 185 
Sioux at their old village [Fort Clark], some eighty miles below, 
that they were forced to abandon it; also their corn patches which 
they had tilled for so many years, for new ones, scratched among the 
weeds and bushes in the bottom of their present place with hoes. 
Their village is built principally of dirt lodges; here and there a 
log cabin put up in good style, with fireplaces and chimneys” (Report 
of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for the year 1862, p. 194). In 
the same letter Latta tersely reports the attack on the village by the 
Dakota. “About the ist of August last a large party of Sioux at- 
tacked the Arikarees in their village, killing a number of them, to- 
gether with a white man trading at that place. They were repulsed 
with a loss of some 30 killed.” 
In the same year Lewis H. Morgan visited the upper Missouri 
River, stopping briefly at the recently abandoned Fort Clark village, 
at Like-a-Fishhook Village, Fort Berthold, and visiting the new 
village which the Arikara were then building. He places the latter 
“two miles above the Minnitaree [Hidatsa] Village, and on the op- 
posite or southwest side of the river .. .”. Regarding his brief visit 
to the Arikara here he says; “I found them actively engaged in the 
construction of a new village. It is back on the bluff, about half 
a mile from the river” (Morgan, 1871, p. 30). 
It is of interest to note that while Latta mentions the presence of 
log cabins in this village at the time of his visit, Morgan makes no 
mention of them, although at the Fort Clark village he saw “several 
rectangular houses constructed of hewn logs” (ibid., p. 42). The 
Missouri Basin Project party recognized nothing at 32ME16 in 1951 
which in any way suggested the former presence of log cabins. 
In 1908 A. B. Stout mapped a number of village sites for the State 
Historical Society of North Dakota, among them one which he labeled 
“The Large Arikara Village Site” (map 4) and, in addition, the 
smaller village site to the west of this. The map of the larger site is, 
without question, a map of 32ME16. This map shows 84 lodge rings 
and one rectangular earth-bank enclosure within the encircling ditch 
and one outside it. In addition to measuring the diameter of each 
lodge ring, Stout numbered them and obtained a partial list of the 
owners’ names, 21 in all. That he was able to obtain such a list 1s not 
at all surprising since the village had been abandoned only 46 years 
previously and his informant had lived there. Stout’s field notes, in 
the files of the State Historical Society of North Dakota, describe the 
adjacent terrain as characterized by gentle slopes and level areas, the 
latter cut by a stream bed. <A gently sloping valley is mentioned as 
present to the east, and a watercourse to the west. He mentions the 
bluffs to the south and says that in them was a spring used by the 
Indians. The lodge rings are described as distinct, with the position 
of the doorways “unmistakably evident,” the rings from 3 to 18 inches 
